Service: A Navy SEAL at War (2 page)

“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 side 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.

I
n 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.

Boss is an integral part of the circle, too. Originally from Arizona, he was in my boat crew in BUD/S, the training course where frogs are born, and until he finally proposed to his bride-to-be, he was JT’s roommate as well. A loyal friend and teammate, he and JT developed a bond so strong that JT joked to Amy, then Boss’s fiancée, that their wedding wouldn’t go through until the two SEALs were officially divorced. Boss is a true free spirit. His spirit is so free that I can imagine it flying all the way back to ancient Greece and inhabiting the body of a Spartan hoplite surrounded at Thermopylae. A master parachutist and hell on wheels in a gunfight, he was born in the wrong century, I sometimes think.

Josh, six foot six and all power and smarts, is one of us, too. After finishing at the Naval Academy, the redneck from Louisiana went on to BUD/S. Graduating with Class 232, right between Morgan and me, he served in several platoons before taking a break to pick up a graduate degree from Columbia University. After that, he returned to the fold and ran with our best. There’s something kinetic about the dynamic between us, and there’s no one other than my twin brother, Morgan, who I’d rather have watching my back.

JJ, one of relatively few African Americans in the SEAL teams, hails from Oklahoma but calls Texas home now. He started his career with my original unit, SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1 (SDVT-1), the ultimate deepwater frogmen. His call sign was Underwater Brother, and he’s one bad mofo. A solid operator and a hellacious gunfighter, he’s been at my side through nearly my entire career. I’ve come close to losing my life more than once. I’m still here only because of things JJ has done.

Then there’s Morgan, my twin brother—seven minutes my
senior. He and I are simply inseparable. When I lay wounded on that mountain, with media reports suggesting I was dead, Morgan knew otherwise just from the feeling that filled his heart. He walked among the crowd of friends and strangers that had gathered at our family’s ranch outside Huntsville, Texas, assuring one and all in no uncertain terms that I was alive. He kept saying, “If they haven’t found his body yet, then he is
not
dead.” He just seemed to know. It was a twin thing. We often say we’ll be together “from the womb to the tomb”—FTWTTT for short.

The SEAL community is one big circle, but these men are the core of my world. When I came home from Operation Redwing, all I really needed to get right again was to spend time in their presence. We’ve bled together, sweated together, and shed tears together. We’ve shared the same quarters and run through the same cycles of training and deployment. No matter what direction I might have been facing, I knew one of these guys always had my back. The longer we knew each other, the more we were aware of the fact that hung heavily in the air every time we got together: this day together might be our last. So we lived our lives as such.

It was never good form to say it too often, but Morgan and I spent every day of our lives up to that point sure that we would never reach age forty. Something, somewhere, was bound to happen. We’d flame out in a blaze of glory, uncelebrated except within the brotherhood.

I had nearly done that, over in Afghanistan. I was lucky to have made it home alive. Still, in a heartbeat, I would have traded my homecoming for the chance to bring any one of the teammates we lost that day home to his family.

On June 27, 2005, near a mountain peak in the Hindu Kush,
almost two miles above sea level, our four-man recon team had gone out on a mission to kill or capture a senior Taliban leader. The next day we were compromised when some goatherds came upon us with their flock. We discussed what to do with them—kill them or free them—and mercy won out. Soon after we let them go, they betrayed us to the enemy. In short order, we were fighting a group of heavily armed Taliban insurgents, primed for battle and pissed off by our appearance on top of their rock. Surrounded and outnumbered, we followed our training, moving together and fighting with discipline, retreating (and mostly falling) down a steep cliff face. Ripping off measured bursts from our rifles, we claimed dozens of enemy lives, but the incoming hail of fire was too much for us to handle.

Danny Dietz, our comms guy and a damn good SEAL, was shot many times and ended up dying in my arms. Our officer in charge, Lieutenant Michael Murphy, stepped out of his cover to make a radio call requesting rescue, knowing it would cost him his life. Matt Axelson, our lead sniper, fought like a lion even after being shot in the head. He and I parted company when an RPG flew in and blasted us in different directions. I tried to find Axe—I didn’t want to be alone—but he was gone forever.

These men fought with everything they had and then some. They never quit. They will never be forgotten. God bless them.

Early that afternoon, having scrambled into the cover of a rocky crevice, I regained consciousness to find myself nearly buried between the steep slopes. As I tended to my wounds and took refuge from the enemy, who was scouring the hills in search of us, a Chinook helicopter, unbeknownst to me, was inbound to our rescue. Carrying a sixteen-man team, the aircraft met its end when a young Taliban fighter shot an RPG through the open
rear ramp as the bird was hovering to land, dropping it to the ground and killing all the men on board.

Laid up in the middle of nowhere, badly wounded, and slowly dying from blood loss, exposure, and dehydration, I called out to God. There came, at last, an unlikely group of saviors: a posse of Pashtun tribesmen—not loyal to the Taliban—who found me and showed me mercy. They took me into their care, fended off my pursuers, led me to their village, and protected me as one of their own.

As it turned out, God heard everything I had to say. He put my life in the hands of a doctor from that tribe, Sarawa, and the village elder’s son, Gulab, who guarded and sheltered me for four days until my brothers in arms came for me, as they always do for one of their own.

After all the headlines about the losses we suffered that day—unprecedented at the time—my homecoming was making news of its own. Just before I touched down in San Antonio, JJ took a call from a reporter for a national cable TV news network. Insisting that she be the first to interview me and demanding an exclusive, she told JJ, “The people want this.” JJ replied in his easy but firm frogman way, “Just tell the people to say thanks. That’s pretty much all the interview you need.” She was offering him money as he hung up the phone, and she promptly went on the air anyway, making up a few things for her story.