Service: A Navy SEAL at War

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  I dedicate this book to my brother, for walking through

  hell with me, and to my wife, for pulling me out

  of the shadows.

  FTWTTT.

  The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in

  front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  A Note to the Reader

  Pseudonyms have been used for special operations personnel who are still active. Retired operators are referred to by their real names if they have given their consent.

  Preface

  I’ve written this book to honor the skill, courage, and sacrifice of the exceptional people I know who serve not only in the SEAL teams but in all the other service branches who I’ve served with along the way. Really this is a book for all who serve. It’s for anyone who wears the uniform; who, when the shooting starts, move toward the gunfire instead of away from it. It’s for a brave breed of individuals, the warfighters, who put everything on the line because it is expected of them, because they stand up for the United States and sometimes die for the privilege.

  There are a lot of things in life that matter. But nothing matters as much as who or what you decide to serve.

  The people I write about in this book devoted themselves to something larger than themselves. Driven by a fire that burns within them to defend their brothers, their sisters, their neighbors, and their nation, they volunteered to stand in a dangerous place in the world and offer themselves as expendable.

  In my years in uniform, I was one of the lucky ones. My pride in serving in the SEAL teams has enabled me to look at myself in the mirror every morning, after everything that’s happened.

  I decided to write Service when I thought about all the selfless, brave souls I knew whose work “downrange” crossed paths with mine. In these pages, you’ll get a glimpse of our elite special operations warriors who occasionally make headlines but strongly prefer to remain anonymous, quiet professionals. And you’ll hear about warriors from other branches of the military whose service means something to me. By the end of the book, you’ll see that we all share at least one trait in common: an ability to get back up and keep pushing forward, through war, through pain, and back into civilian life, where our service to our families and our communities is just as important as anything we did in uniform.

  I was one of those quiet professionals. It was my fate to come out of the shadows. I wrote Lone Survivor to honor three of my brothers who went into battle with me one afternoon in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, and didn’t come home, and sixteen of America’s best who died on a helicopter, flying into hell to save us. Since then, sadly, that mission can no longer lay claim to being the darkest day in the history of the special operations world. The bad days keep coming. On August 6, 2011, we lost thirty of our most elite. None of us will ever forget our losses.

  On the afternoon on June 28, 2005, I awoke to find myself alone, hidden in a crevice near the peak of the mountain known as Sawtalo Sar, after three of my teammates had been killed in action and the helicopter carrying the rescue team, unbeknownst to me, had been lost in action as well. I lost a little bit of myself out there. In failing in a task, in meeting a serious setback or a defeat on a mission or in our careers, we come out the other side changed. If we don’t, we’ve failed again. But long before that doomed operation, I had learned that part of my strength came from never letting a single experience in my life define me. I believe that there is a reason for everything. The situations I’ve found myself in are stepping-stones on a path to a larger and unknowable destination. I now have a wife and a son, so many glorious blessings. But this remains the same: after every step, even the missed ones, I’ll pack up, push through, and soldier on. I can only hope to do this because I have a family who loves me. Some are family by blood. Others are family in blood, men who won the honor of wearing the Trident, and who as teammates proved the truth of the saying, “The only easy day was yesterday.” Many members of my family live, breathe, and work in dangerous, undisclosed locations all around the world. Some of them are no longer with us, having paid the ultimate price while doing their work, and in death still stand watch over us. They pledged themselves to that job and gave their last full measure to fulfill the pledge. Our family stays together not by training, courage, or skill but by the forces that bind us: love, honor, commitment, and loyalty.

  This book is a salute to everyone who’s worn Old Glory on his shoulder, carried a rifle for this nation, and guarded the front line or been deployed behind it, into the enemy’s backyard—whether in today’s wars or in others. Too many heroes never get the recognition they deserve from the public. I am proud to be able to share a few of their stories from my own perspective. Since I wrote Lone Survivor, my personal story has become very public and I have felt strongly ever since that many others out there deserve to have their own service recognized. Service in wartime pushed them to the limit. They gave their all—and got something back that no one else can claim: collectively, they form a single thread woven into the fabric of this country’s history, part of something larger than themselves. There are other things in life that matter. But to me, nothing matters as much.

  —February 2012

  Prologue

  Brotherhood

  October 2009

  Pensacola, Florida

  It was about four in the morning when my cell phone started buzzing. I sat up, grabbed it off the nightstand, and looked at the display. The caller was one of my closest teammates, JT.

  At that hour, I knew what the score was. Sliding my finger over the glass to answer the ring, I asked him, “What’s wrong with my brother?”

  It had to be about Morgan, and it was.

  “He’s stable, bro, but he’s really jacked up.”

  My body went weak as I replied, “I’m on my way.” As I hung up, my stomach lurched. I ran to the bathroom and started throwing up.

  JT was calling from the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia. That night, twenty-three miles off Virginia Beach, my brother and his platoon were on a training op. The skies were clear and the seas were rolling easily when their Black Hawk helicopter approached a U.S. ship. The helo descended from her port side and entered a hover over the upper superstructure. As the pilot eased closer to the ship, USNS Arctic, the crew let out the ropes. As they dropped to the deck—basically a limp fireman’s pole running from the bird to the deck—Morgan and his squad sat at the ready, legs dangling down from the open right-side door.

  With America’s effort to stop international piracy ramping up, search-and-seizure exercises like this one were a regular part of the training schedule. Six months earlier, after pirates took over the containership Maersk Alabama, one of our sniper teams set up on the fantail of a U.S. warship and killed the trio of criminals who were holding the American captain hostage.

  But as my brother and his teammates were preparing to fast-rope down to the Arctic, their aircraft’s main rotor clipped a heavy guyline supporting one of the ship’s huge exhaust stacks. The blades gathered in the thick cable, reeling it in around the shaft. As the Black Hawk jerked d
ownward, the guys perched in the door were thrown back into the crew compartment. They tumbled across the deck of the helo and piled into the left side of the fuselage. Then the helicopter crashed into the ship, steel on heavier steel, and rocked over onto its side.

  Morgan was knocked dizzy by the impact, but cleared his head in time to see flames rushing at him as if they were shot from a giant flamethrower. Blinded by the smoke and with a fractured back, he struggled away from the inferno. Crawling out of the wreckage, he fell about fifteen feet down to the next deck of the ship. The impact was shattering, and it knocked him out cold.

  As shipboard firefighters went to work, a hazmat crew was called out and all hands took care of the wounded. When they finished triage, they found that one man, the Black Hawk’s crew chief, had been killed, and eight more, including Morgan, badly injured. Quickly, another helo landed on the ship, took the casualties aboard, and flew them to the hospital in Portsmouth. From there, the news traveled fast.

  When JT called me, I was in Florida doing physical rehabilitation following back surgery. After my last two combat deployments, my spine was a constant project for the docs, but nothing was going to keep me from flying to Portsmouth to see my brother. Morgan and I always drop whatever we’re doing to cover each other’s backs—and “always” means always. I called a generous friend who had a private plane and prevailed upon him to help me. As he routed the plane to the Pensacola airport to pick me up, I packed a three-day bag, jumped into my rental car, and sped to the general aviation hangar. Within a few short hours the Gulf of Mexico was disappearing behind us.

  The flight north seemed to take forever, and the nearer we got to the Norfolk airport, near Portsmouth, the slower time seemed to move. I reached the hospital to learn that Morgan was in the MRI lab waiting on a scan. When the elevator doors opened, he lifted his head and cut his eyes in my direction, and I sprinted as fast as I could to him. He was strapped down to a gurney, suffering from a bad case of the hiccups. Each one of those little spasms in his diaphragm whipped through his busted-up core and racked him with pain. Our eyes locked, and the sight of him lying there injured brought a wash of acid into my throat. My stomach flipped again, but there was nothing down there left to throw up.

  “Hey, mijo,” he said, using his nickname for me—meaning “baby boy” in Spanish. The sound of his voice brought me back to reality. I took Morgan by the hand, gave him a careful hug, and said, “I’m here, bro. We’ll get through this.”

  The hospital tech, hunched over his computer, was busy with something and didn’t seem to notice what was going on. Apparently, the MRI couldn’t be performed while the patient was convulsing with hiccups, but nothing was being done about the situation. I lit into the tech forcefully about focusing on what should have mattered most: “Get your lazy ass away from that computer and get my brother some help before I jerk your arms off and beat you half to death with them!” That promptly got Morgan medicated, and when the contractions finally stopped, the techs slid him into the tube.

  Seeing my brother laid up and helpless in traction tore my guts out. He’s one of the toughest men I’ve ever known. He isn’t just pain-tolerant or pain-resistant—he’s pain-defiant. When he snapped an ankle in college and didn’t have the money for treatment, he just hopped around on that busted hoof for weeks because he had to go to class and keep working. During his career he’s broken plenty of bones and had plenty of bloody scrapes, but those were nothing like this: the MRI showed that his back was fractured in six places, and that his pelvis was broken, too.

  In the waiting room, I linked up with JT and another close teammate of ours, Boss. During the five days Morgan was in the hospital, the three of us set up a cot in his room and didn’t leave him for a minute. We kept a rotating watch, twenty-four hours a day. Morgan doesn’t take painkillers unless the pain prevents him from sleeping or otherwise gets in the way of his healing, so we did our best to keep him diverted. We made sure he had visitors when he wanted them. We brought in a DVD player and reading material and tried to keep things lively and upbeat. Most important, we let him rest.

  When he had to relieve himself, we ran the nurses out and did the work ourselves. One of us took his head, the other his feet, and the third one took his midsection, and we rolled him over nice and easy and let him do his business. With all those meds and liquids flowing into him through that IV, it was usually a mess. (I remember it being like a scene from The Exorcist, but out of the other end.) You could always tell who the lowest-ranking guy in the room was, because he had cleanup. Whatever he needed, we helped the best we could. That’s what brothers do.

  But you can’t keep Morgan down for long. When his appetite returned, we knew he was on his way. And when JT started hitting on the nurses, I knew we had turned another corner; it was clear that Morgan’s situation had settled down enough to let us start thinking about ourselves a little again. That was when we started laying the tough love on him.

  “Your back’s broken—welcome to my world, bro. But what took you so long to get here?”

  “You’re not feeling sorry for yourself, are you?”

  “If you man up, you know this’ll be over soon.”

  “If you don’t get it done, your team’s going downrange without you.”

  That last one burned him most.

  When the docs came in, we asked them if they could relocate the big scar on his forehead down to about midcheek, because most chicks dig scars.

  Once in a while we gave it a rest long enough to give him a sponge bath, but mostly we made sure he knew that his team would expect him back as soon as surgery and rehab were done. Just for posterity’s sake, we took some hilarious photos of him whacked out and lying in his own misery. We figured the day would come when we’d need to whip out those pictures just to keep him humble.

  After a surgical procedure and several more days of hospital life, Morgan finally said, “Bro, I’ve got to get the hell out of here.” This wasn’t because he’d tired of our unofficial treatment program—he’d simply reached the point where he had to escape from captivity. That was when we drew up the evac plan.

  It was quick and dirty, and with an operator like JT on point, we thought it just might work. Come nighttime, JT went down the hall and started hitting on one of the nurses. When we heard the laughter start, Boss took advantage of the diversion to throw on some borrowed lab coats, heave Morgan into his wheelchair, and roll him right out of his room. It was as simple as a walk to the elevators. Against medical advice, we wheeled him out the door and carried him to freedom. Operation Homebound was a success.

  After the dust settled from all that, Morgan ended up with me in Pensacola, right back where I was when JT called me with the news. He joined me at a state-of-the-art facility, Athletes’ Performance, that has a special rehab program for getting guys like us back to speed. Believe me, after working out there for a while, I knew what it would take for Morgan to get healed up again. But I also knew he would do whatever it took. Quitting is impossible when a brotherhood like ours circles up around you and focuses on getting you right again. They’d done it for me after I came home from Operation Redwing in July of 2005. Now it was Morgan’s turn.

  Serving in uniform during wartime, you find that the urgency of the situations you’re in makes your relationships with your brothers tight, permanent, and unlike any others in your life. Relationships with those outside your closest fraternity seem fleeting, temporary, and disposable. But all of us are brothers. That’s something I realize every time I run into a combat veteran in civilian life.

  There aren’t many degrees of separation between any of the 2.4 million men and women who’ve served in Iraq or Afghanistan. We’ve smelled the shitty air in Iraq and felt our lungs burn in the Hindu Kush. We’ve squeezed ourselves into Humvees and Black Hawks and been shot at. We’ve been stuck in slowly moving convoys, more than a little worried about what the next bump in the road will trigger. I think of the soldiers and U.S. Marines we fought side by sid
e with, the point men and breachers, the bomb techs, the JTACs, intel guys, pilots and other augmentees, the doctors and medics, support platoons, and all the others. More than anyone else, of course, I think of my teammates. Many of them are still in the teams today, still writing their stories, visiting hell upon America’s enemies. Just thinking of them takes me back to the good ole days. I know I wouldn’t be here without them.

  The only way out of hell is to walk right through it. When you do, it always helps to have your brothers by your side.

  Part I

  How We Fight

  1

  One More Round

  In any team environment, and especially in a group of highly driven people dedicated to a difficult mission, you’ll always find smaller crews that stick together tightly and lean on each other, no matter how hard things may get. That’s the way it’s always been with the men who are the core of my world. Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the home of our odd-numbered SEAL teams, is right on the beach, just steps away from the Pacific’s swells. At Coronado, where SEALs are born, we were drawn together by a force that was part personality and part sensibility. We snapped together like magnets.

  JT is one of them. He’s an Iowa kid, tough as a cornstalk, and stands about six foot four, as fit and strong as God meant any man to be. He’s a champion triathlete, not to mention one of the finest enlisted warriors in the SEAL community. Reckless with his wit and shockingly effective in any kind of fight, he’s the kind of guy you’re glad to have on your side, whether on deployment to a combat zone or in a small-town bar when there’s some stupid trouble brewing. With his big personality, he’s our point man in most situations. Outgoing and upbeat, he’s always ready for whatever his impulsive hilarity may bring us. He’s been that way forever.