Service: A Navy SEAL at War (34 page)

The news shocked the audience. In May, after SEAL operators killed Osama bin Laden on a midnight air-assault raid into Pakistan, the teams—and especially the one JT served with—became a popular obsession all over again. The simultaneous loss of so many of our best operators became a big story. (Some reports suggested that some of the frogmen who helped take out bin Laden died in the August shootdown. It wasn’t true.)

A lady in the front row put her face into her hands. There was stirring, nervous murmuring, and some sobs. All that the news media had reported so far was that a NATO helicopter had gone down in Afghanistan. I didn’t relish my role as the messenger, but I had to tell the audience that I was simply in no condition to continue talking. I rambled a little and finally said, “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but my mind’s on something else.” As my voice choked up, I broke it off. I nodded apologetically to everybody and walked off the stage. The only thing I knew to do was make flank speed to Norfolk. I had to be with my brother and our teammates. The wreckage of the helo was still smoldering on the ground when I was en route to join them in their grief.

The last that was ever heard from JT’s helo was a simple announcement of its ETA. “Three minutes out,” the copilot said.

About sixty miles west of Kabul, they were inbound to a hot LZ in the Tangi Valley in Wardak Province, where a platoon of Rangers was shooting it out with Taliban forces. What started as a snatch-and-grab of a high-value target turned into a sustained firefight after the enemy detected the ground forces’ approach.
As the tracers began to fly, the Rangers’ target, a warlord who controlled Taliban forces in the valley, tried to hightail it out of the area with several of his lieutenants. They took off like rabbits scrambling for the brush.

The Rangers, tied down under fire, couldn’t pursue. Seeing his prize slipping away, the U.S. commander called for help in cutting off the escape route of the squirters. Our boys were the handiest rifles available. That night they didn’t have their own op to run, so they were standing by as a quick reaction force, or what we call a spin-up team. When the Rangers called, they went. JT and his brothers piled into a fueled, loaded, and ready CH-47D Chinook flown by Army reservists from Bravo Company of Task Force Knighthawk, part of the Tenth Combat Aviation Brigade. That bird had thirty-three seats, and it took off full.

The Chinook, call sign Extortion 17, was inbound fast, tracing the floor of a valley at an altitude of about three hundred feet, when enemy fighters on the slopes took it under fire. From the tower of a two-story mud-brick building about two hundred meters to the helo’s south, Taliban fighters fired two or three RPGs in rapid succession. The first rocket missed, but the second hit the aft rotor assembly and exploded, slicing away ten feet of a fiberglass blade.

The helo jerked violently and lost altitude fast. Inside, anyone who wasn’t thrown out the open rear ramp was shaken so hard that he couldn’t have been conscious when the Chinook finally burst into flames. It was about three a.m. when Extortion 17 hit the deck.

The Rangers rushed to secure the crash site. No extended Air Force CSAR mission, no long march by a ground team, would
be needed to bring these fallen warriors home. But the Taliban commander got away, and the men who shot down the Chinook were soon on the run, too, reportedly trying to escape into Pakistan.

JT. Everyone knew him by his initials. He was also called JT Money, inspired by the pep talk Vince Vaughn gave to his down-and-out friend in the movie
Swingers
. His unit worked in the shadows, but in death—as long as we live well—we all come into heaven’s light. So, too, with our fallen brother. Now we can honor him by the name his parents, George and Kathy, of Rockford, Iowa, gave him: Jon Thomas Tumilson. He was money.

It had been JT who had kept watch over Morgan when my brother was in the hospital and whose way with the nurses had given us the smoke screen necessary to evacuate Morgan from the premises. And now…

Boss and Morgan greeted me at the airport in Norfolk. Boss was in BUD/S with me and had gotten tight with JT during a Team 1 deployment to Baghdad. Both were hugely outgoing nonconformists with strong moral codes. In 2009, right before JT went to the East Coast, he and Morgan served as best men at Boss’s wedding. Boss’s bride, Amy, became like a sister to us in the teams. She understood us, was strong enough to stand up to us, and was therefore the ideal partner for a hard-driving guy like Boss. Along the way, she became as close to JT as his sisters, Joy and Kristie, were.

Family was important to JT. One Christmas, when his parents weren’t expecting him to be home, he surprised them by
jumping out of a large wrapped box. (Stealth—that’s how our best guys roll.)

Soon Mel joined up with us, as did our friends Scott, Andy McGee, and some others, too. We circled up and leaned on each other for strength.

The Tumilson family asked the crew to bring JT’s personal belongings to Iowa. It was an honor to be asked, and as more of our friends and teammates rolled into town, we had enough strength in numbers to handle the pain of going to his house in Virginia Beach and breaking it down.

We loaded anything the family might want, including his Honda CBR1000RR sport bike and several mountain bikes, into the bed of our pickup trucks for the drive home to Iowa. As we rummaged through JT’s closets, attic, and storage containers, we tried to wrap our minds around what had been lost. Sorting through his familiar collection of crazy, offensive T-shirts, outdoor gear, weapons, plaques and awards, and a number of things we hadn’t seen before—shoeboxes full of photos of friends and family, and other personal things he held close—we saw a great patriot’s life scroll before us like a history lesson.

JT had a chocolate Lab named Hawkeye, who he loved like a son. Scott inherited Hawkeye, as per JT’s will. The neighbors were great, bringing food and standing by to help. No one seemed to know what to say. Really, there were no words: “I’m sorry”—that was all you could offer.

The final culmination of JT’s quest to become a Texan was his pickup truck, a Chevy Silverado 2500HD. As he pursued his quest, Morgan and I treated him as though he were a student in the Lone Star State version of BUD/S every step of the way.
When he first visited us in Huntsville, driving some other brand, we gave him a hard time. When he got smart and bought that Chevy, then jacked up the suspension with a six-inch lift kit, we said he was driving a “low rider.” (If you’re going Texas-style, you’ve gotta have at least fourteen inches of lift.) JT spent hours poring over accessories catalogs, only to decide on Baja fenders. But in Texas, you need a full-on Ranch Hand replacement kit, strong enough to brush aside a cow. (Or at least that’s what we told him.) When he brought around his latest model, we asked him why anyone living in urban Virginia needed a Duramax diesel 4x4 with twenty-two-inch BMF Novakane Death Metal eight-lug rims (six hundred bucks apiece). It was almost a respectable vehicle for Walker County, but
Norfolk?
We also had to point out to him that no self-respecting rancher would drive a truck painted that awful metallic blue. “With that rig, you’re on a road to nowhere, bro.” The one-upmanship twisted him in knots, but it kept him hustling.

Now, looking at that metallic blue Silverado in the driveway, all we could do was smile and love him for the dedication and passion he brought to everything. True Love was one of a kind.

We soon learned that on the morning JT died, he had sent the people closest to him some very emotional e-mails. He had told more than a few of us he didn’t think he’d come home from this deployment. When he’d said that to Morgan and me when he was visiting Texas on leave, we didn’t think much of it—all of us say that kind of thing from time to time. But we don’t say it
much
. Yet now, every time anyone mentioned JT speaking this way, somebody else would pipe up with, “Yeah, he said that to me, too.” So JT knew. And Boss felt it happen. Considering this
in light of my own experiences, I do believe these spooky feelings mean something.

After our work at JT’s place was done, we went to see the widow of another frogman who died on that helo, Chief Matt Mills. We knew him from way back in 2002, having met at SEAL Qualification Training. He was an Arlington, Texas, guy who we all liked and respected. We did what we could for his wife, Keri, and their children, taking care of the trash and cleaning house. We told Keri stories about Matt and held her close.

The following day, August 9, I parted company with the gang for a quick trip to Chicago. That night, Boss, Morgan, Scott, Justin, Sean, and Andy finished loading up and hit the road for Iowa. Boss was at the wheel of JT’s Silverado with Scott, Sean, and Hawkeye riding along. Morgan drove his own rig, hauling Justin and McGee. With a playlist of JT’s favorite music cycling through—“Fallen Angel” by Poison, “Back Down South” by Kings of Leon, “Hero of the Day” by Metallica, Toby Keith’s “American Soldier,” “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band, on and on—they cruised through the Shenandoah Valley into West Virginia and Ohio, keeping up a ninety-mile-an-hour pace. Soon, the cops were onto them—not with their radar guns, but to provide an escort. And when word got around about what was happening, people turned out in a big way, rendezvousing with my brothers in Indiana and taking them to the border of the next jurisdiction, each patrol handing off to their colleagues across the city limits or county line.

Boss and Morgan could have taken any exit between Norfolk and Des Moines and been less than a morning’s drive from someone who was ready to lend a hand. Offers of places to stay, home-cooked meals, support, and friendship came from South Carolina,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Indiana, Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio, California, Tennessee, New Mexico, Kentucky, and Arizona. That reads like lyrics from a Johnny Cash song. Each time they crossed a state line, they stopped for a group photo with JT’s Gadsden flag—the yellow one from colonial times, with the rattlesnake and the slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me.” Volunteers donated gift certificates for gas and food. Melanie followed through diligently, responding to all the generous offers and helping all the chaotic goodwill that was stirred up online materialize as the guys continued their trip.

Whenever I get down, I always try to remember: this is the kind of country we live in, a country of decent, caring people who stand by to help a good cause.

Late on the first night, they reached Louisville. Thanks to the Facebook family, they got not only good advice on a place to stay but also rounded up some volunteers who stood watch in the hotel parking lot, keeping an eye on their precious cargo overnight. The next day, the mayor of Indianapolis met them. With a police escort, they visited Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts. At the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, they kissed the bricks. Then they toured the Congressional Medal of Honor Memorial, where there’s a tribute to Mikey Murphy, among other great heroes.

Meanwhile, downrange, in the world’s dangerous places, our teammates had stayed busy, as they always do. On the night of August 9, news broke that a U.S. special operations team had tracked the men who had shot down that Chinook as they tried to flee into Pakistan. The insurgents were all killed in an air strike. We knew it would happen eventually, and those headlines
produced some quiet satisfaction, but that’s the most that can be said for it.

And when the media got wind of the journey of the blue pickup and showed up shoving microphones in people’s faces, Boss, Morgan, and the guys had to go undercover. Several hundred people converged on them at a gas station, thanks to a tip that some reporters had found them there. Boss escaped detection by telling the interviewer there had been a misunderstanding: he was just another ordinary American patriot, looking to catch a glimpse of the road-trippers.

Speeding through Illinois and reaching the Iowa state line, they stopped for another photo op. The sheriff from Rockford—one of George’s close friends, who had known JT since he was a kid—took over escort duty. In Davenport, they linked up with some Patriot Guard Riders. A Good Samaritan paid for their hotel room.

On Friday afternoon, after three full days on the road, they finally reached Rockford. Over the next few days, the brotherhood showed up in force. At least thirty-five of JT’s teammates rolled into town. Mel and I flew into Minneapolis and joined them with our new baby, Axe, and spent several days getting the family ready for JT.

The following Thursday, JT’s body was flown in from Dover to Mason City. The white hearse carrying his casket was the centerpiece of a procession that included a dozen police cars and about five hundred bikers from the Patriot Guard Riders. When JT reached Rockford, both sides of Highway 122 outside town were lined with people holding American flags. Many of them were small kids. In town, the Avenue of the Saints was jammed
as JT came home. Red, white, and blue was everywhere: bunting, shirts, and flags of every size. It was a patriotic town honoring its fallen son and his family, and it did them proud.

The governor of Iowa and one of its U.S. senators were among the fifteen hundred people who gathered in the gym at the Rudd–Rockford–Marble Rock Community School for the memorial service. Display cases in the foyer showed his valor awards. His citation for a Bronze Star with a “V” was a snapshot of his work as a frogman. It read: