Service: A Navy SEAL at War (26 page)

Many of my teammates drew on powerful military traditions in their lineages. Matt Axelson’s grandfather was on board the USS
Pennsylvania
when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, and his grandmother served in the Marine Corps. His dad was drafted into the Army and served as a radio operator with an infantry company in Vietnam. Danny Dietz’s father was in Nam, too, a Navy corpsman attached to a Marine Corps reconnaissance unit. Master Chief, who is a first-generation American from a Czech-German family, said his grandfather was a conscript in the German army. Other teammates of mine were first-generation military and served proudly as pioneers in their bloodlines. Either way is fine by me.

Our family folklore holds that Luttrells are lucky in war. Based on the experience of Morgan and me, I guess that’s true. But we haven’t always made a clean transition back to the country we helped defend in the wars that failed to kill us. In the long line of family members who have served this country, Uncle Frank is a cautionary tale.

Though I never met him, he was a huge presence in my life, and the most powerful of the many forces that steered me into
military service. He was with General George S. Patton in just about every major U.S. operation in the European theater during World War II, from Africa to southern Europe. He even served as Patton’s driver. In combat, he put together a glittering record, earning several Silver Stars and several more Purple Hearts in battles from North Africa up through the boot of Italy and southern France—all the way to Nazi Germany itself. Whenever Morgan or I were downrange, my mother prayed to his spirit to look after us and keep us safe. But Uncle Frank’s spirit, powerful as it must have been, took a severe beating during his own time under fire. He never talked about his wartime life. He practiced an almost monastic silence on the subject.

My father described another war veteran who was close to the family, the father of my godfather. Somewhere along the way, something terrible had happened to him, something that must have broken his soul. Dad described him as sitting by the sea, his face in his hands, still and pensive, watching the waves. The root of his haunted feeling may well have come from sheer coincidence: he noticed that almost every time he got close to a young soldier in his unit, that soldier would turn up dead in the next combat action. As his company made its way across Europe toward the German border, he came to believe he was the touch of death to his own men. That superstition became corrosive.

My dad usually glorified military service to us, but as we got older we learned to see the other side of the story. At our house, my mother has an old-fashioned tintype of Uncle Frank. It’s a faded photograph, but it shows him at his best. That’s the way I’ll always remember him, but the image sends conflicting messages: though he looks awfully tough, it’s hard to miss the fact that wartime life and the passage of years had reduced him to a shadow on
a sheet of iron. When the war was over, Uncle Frank went home to Arkansas a lost soul. He took refuge in drink and before long was living out of railroad cars. He’d show up unannounced at family events and stay until he wore out his welcome with his drinking and sullen moods. Then it was back to the road.

I wondered if I was destined to follow these examples. If, as now seemed likely, I really was going to survive into old age, what kind of old man would I finally become?

R. V. Burgin became a Marine when they were still making dog tags out of brass. Born in 1922, he belonged to the generation that would be called upon to defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in World War II. I met him by virtue of the same force that drew me to so many other frogmen during my career: he is a Texan.

Raised in Jewett, Texas, now living in Lancaster, he served in the Marine Corps during World War II. He saw action in the Pacific at Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, and Okinawa. If you know your history you’ll know that those names are shorthand for “hell on earth.”

To help him through it, he always kept a short prayer at the ready: “God, I’m in your hands. Take care of me.” At Peleliu, as Mr. Burgin was going ashore in an amphibious tractor with the number 13 painted on its bow, God stretched his hand down from heaven and hung his boat up on a reef, blowing its appointment with a Japanese artillery round arcing down from a howitzer on the beach. Had the amtrac kept going, it would have been blown to pieces.

The mangrove jungle that covered half the island concealed a
landscape of nightmares from our reconnaissance planes. The Marines were surprised by the steep ridges of limestone and deep swamps that gave so much perfect cover to the Japanese defenders. It was a rotten place. If you threw a rock into a bush, it produced a cloud of green flies thick enough to cast a shadow. The only clean water to drink was deep behind enemy lines. The corpses teemed with maggots. By September of 1944, the Japanese army had smartened up. They learned to quit banzai-charging. On Peleliu they were stealthy throat slitters whose arrival was announced in the night with scuffles, grunts, and long screams from American foxholes. Their snipers targeted our stretcher bearers. Though the island was just two miles by six, the ferocity of the defenders bogged down Mr. Burgin and his buddies for a month. The Japanese weren’t on Peleliu; they were
in
Peleliu. Thousands of them dug caves right into the island. Sometimes the first sign of them was the sound of their voices leaking up from underfoot.

Corporal Burgin was one of the stoutest NCOs in the unit, but even he reached the point where he didn’t care if he lived or died. The First Marine Division had more than sixty-five hundred casualties in thirty days, and their Army replacements took fifteen hundred more. Mr. Burgin’s unit, the K/3/5—K Company, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment—went ashore with 235 men. When the Japanese surrendered, just eighty-five were still standing. There’s a photo of the remaining group on Mr. Burgin’s living room wall. Most of them are skinny and exhausted. Some of them look like ghosts.

After the war, Mr. Burgin locked his experiences in a box and shoved it into a deep recess within him. He didn’t speak of it for thirty-five years. Not a word of the trials of Peleliu, or of wiping
out a Japanese machine-gun position in Okinawa, an act that earned him a Bronze Star with Valor. Though he worked in civilian life with four combat Marines, veterans of Tarawa, Guam, and Tinian, they never talked about it, and when the war did come up it was only in the context of funny stories, which mostly served to keep them from thinking about the more troubling ones.

I think it’s only when the shooting stops that you realize how war has changed you. You’ll be sitting there reading the paper, or doing a household chore, and you’ll feel yourself craving something. You may feel like you’re ready for action, but there’s no action to be had. Your internal wiring is standing by, ready to offer its full capacity to carry the charge of the physical, psychological, and emotional overload you’ve gotten used to in the war zone. Since those sensations are not generally available in civilian life, you settle for the next best thing—removing all that excess capacity to carry those sensations, just so you can keep the feeling of being fully charged. And so here comes that bottle, turning itself upside down in your mouth. In a few minutes, depending on your metabolism, you’re right back in a satisfying—but very temporary—state of equilibrium.

If writing about my experiences in Afghanistan had been a kind of first-phase therapy for me, traveling around the country talking to the public after
Lone Survivor
was published was the next phase, and a pretty startling one at that. Today, when I watch the first television interview I did, I see my skin twitching with nerves still tuned for war. At the time, it had been nearly two years since Operation Redwing went south. Sitting there in the network studio wearing a suit and tie, I spoke haltingly, eyes darting. At the end, I told the interviewer, Matt Lauer, “I died
on that mountain, too, sir. I left a part of myself up there.” Getting that out in the open on national TV was one step toward dealing with the fact that just because bad things happen in war, your life doesn’t have to be over.

My reasons for writing that book were twofold: to honor Mikey, Danny, Axe, and the all the guys in the rescue helo, and to debunk the inaccurate stories that were gaining circulation. My teammates encouraged me to step out from the cover of being a “quiet professional,” and our higher-ups did as well. Without their encouragement the story would never have been known to the public. At first I had a real problem with the idea, but now I have a feeling that the story has done more good than I will ever know.

Publishing a book requires you to put yourself out there. Speaking to audiences large and small, I felt like I’d been turned inside out. There were times when that was literally the case. If I told the story in too much detail, I’d feel it in my gut. I’d go to the restroom and give back dinner. No matter how much time goes by, every time I tell the story my body sweats and my heart races uncontrollably. In less than a minute, I’m back on the mountain.

More than a few times, the price I paid for slipping off that path was worth it. When there were other veterans in the audience, they would see my discomfort, our eyes would meet, and then I’d see theirs. A moment like that usually passed silently, never a word spoken. I’ve shared more than a few of them with older warriors, and after each one I came away feeling that, though I’d never met the man before and though we may be from different service branches, races, creeds, colors, or upbringings, all of us are brothers, once you’ve boiled all the unimportant stuff away.

Same blood, different mud.

I
’ll tell you one story that stays with me, one I wish I could have told when I was working on
Lone Survivor
. It’s the story of the U.S. Air Force combat search and rescue (CSAR) pilots who flew high into the mountains of Kunar Province, searching for us near the summit of the mountain known as Sawtalo Sar. One of them, a hell of a good helicopter pilot they call Spanky, finally came down and picked my sorry ass off a mountainside in the Hindu Kush late one night. Some of his brave aviator teammates had the honor, finally, of bringing my fallen teammates home.

Of all the guys who put on flight suits and take a seat behind the stick, none are closer to the special operations community than the helicopter pilots. Most of our operations rely on them. They risk their lives with us, and take us into and out of the rabbit holes where we do our work. The news headlines you see are often a testament to the price they pay. I think of the pilots and aircrews who served in the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia in 1993, and over Roberts Ridge during Operation Anaconda in 2002. Sixteen men made the ultimate sacrifice on June 28, 2005, trying to deliver the rest of my platoon to assist Mikey, Danny, Axe, and me. For every mission gone wrong, of
course, there are a hundred good ones you never hear about. And the story I’m going to tell now is one of them.

I will always owe a debt to the pilot and crew of the helicopter that finally found me five days after it all went south, and also to the pilots of the A-10 Warthogs who cleared their path to the landing zone. It’s a heroic tale, one that ranks with any I’ve ever heard for the gallantry of the aviators involved.

With nineteen of our dead in several locations, Operation Redwing produced a whirlwind of confusion. While I was still fighting for my life with my team, most of the A-10 pilots who would play a large role in helping Spanky Peterson reach me during the search and rescue mission were focused on a big firefight taking place down south, near the city of Khost, between U.S. forces and Al Qaeda and Taliban forces coming across the border from Pakistan. When their daily intel briefing mentioned an operation known as Redwing, they didn’t know anything about it. My team was under a different command. A pair of A-10s was scrambled from Bagram as soon as we alerted our command that we were in contact with enemy forces. The planes arrived overhead just in time to witness Turbine 33—the call sign of the ill-fated helicopter carrying our sixteen would-be rescuers—rolling down the mountainside, a ball of fire. From that moment on, chaos reigned, and the priority was to search for survivors near that black smear on the rocks.

A huge CSAR effort ensued. Dozens of aircraft of various types were vectored into the area from all over Afghanistan. Part of the reason things got so confused was that nearly everyone from my command who had all the details about Operation Redwing was on board Turbine 33 when it went down. The secrecy of our mission meant that we hadn’t filed an evasion plan
with the Air Force. Special operations forces sometimes work in that independent way, but when things go wrong it can complicate and slow a response, and in this case overlapping and conflicting command responsibilities definitely made life difficult for our rescuers.

Though the CSAR mission that eventually took shape to find me was epic in scale, I could see very little of it from my vantage point on the ground. When I was hunkered down on the mountainside, all fragged up and with several broken bones, an A-10 flew over my position, fast and low. It was so close I felt I could have hit it with a rock.

If an airplane ever went through BUD/S, it would finish Hell Week as an A-10 Thunderbolt II, better known as a Warthog. When you see it fly by, it just looks like a knuckle-dragging brawler, knees bent, hands on its holsters, with a fast and nasty turbofan swagger. Highly versatile, it flies missions that encompass the yin and yang of life and death in wartime. Close air support is a rough business that the A-10, armed with an assortment of potent weapons, excels at. Few sights from the ground are sweeter than a Warthog playing with us overhead, throwing storms of lead at our enemy with its 30mm Gatling gun. CSAR is the Warthog’s other calling. With good low-altitude flight characteristics, a sturdy, survivable airframe, and an ability to remain on station for a long time at slow speeds, it’s excellent at saving lives, too. It’s a guardian angel and an angel of death, all at the same time.