Service: A Navy SEAL at War (37 page)

Sleeping with your phone isn’t ideal, but some of my best memories are those 3 a.m. wake-up calls. We were dreamers; we would talk about what we could, especially when he was deployed. When I asked him how his day was, I would get one of two answers: “Good” or “Same old same old.” The rest of the time, which could be as long as an hour, we dreamed of what we were going to do after he retired. From career choices to having a garage full of motorcycles, camping trips, and a huge home for the family to visit, built just the way we wanted. I’d have a perfect kitchen so I could cook my heart out, and he’d have an
outrageous man cave that was far enough away that he didn’t wake me up when the boys came to visit.

I still have every e-mail my husband ever sent me, and ten or fifteen saved voice mails, just random ones, so I can go back to hear him say “I love you.” I came into this relationship knowing that there could be a happy ending and hoping that there would be, but not naive. Who knew that saving these silly things would be so important one day? I had always just put them in a folder, not knowing that one day they would be like a journal of our life together.

When that hollow knock on the door came at 6:30 one morning, the e-mail saving came to a screeching halt and being a single parent became a reality. His death shattered all of those dreams that we had together. I have never said, “Oh, that will never happen to me” and I have never asked, “Why did this happen to me?” Even knowing that, statistically speaking, the more times you roll the dice, the larger the risk. The risk is great, but these men chose to sign on the dotted line; therefore, so did we. That being said, we wives serve our country, too.

They say that you can’t choose who you fall in love with, but you can most definitely choose your path. I chose to follow the path my heart led me to. I still stand behind him with honor, courage, and commitment.

Rest in peace, my love. I hope I served you well.

I
f you do anything for fun, doing it professionally in the military may ruin it for you for life. After my nine years in the teams, I no longer scuba dive. As a veteran of the SDV teams, I see no point going polar-bear swimming or even exploring the reefs at Hanauma Bay or Truk Lagoon. Not when there’s a perfectly good barbecue joint just down the coast road a stretch. I don’t rock climb or go to the beach. Mel thinks I’m crazy for refusing to take cold showers, but anyone who’s gone through BUD/S will understand.

Though I haven’t discussed it much publicly, diving was a huge part of my time in uniform. In the SDV teams, we took it to the bottom. Normal dives in the numbered teams are just a few hours long. Some of ours in the SDV teams took eight hours or more, in total darkness. My longest dive was over ten hours long. I actually have fallen asleep under water twice. And there’s nothing else like it. Locking out of a submerged submarine, we’d swim in from offshore, go over the beach, change into our dry gear, do a snatch-and-grab or a recon mission, and return the way we came, back into the arms of Mother Ocean. Nobody else can do it as well as SDV guys. It’s the womb we are born from
and the home we always return to. It’s also the truest definition of
suck
.

With all that said, I knew I had to find something to keep the adrenaline pumping after I got out, so I started hunting to get that rush again. I know it’s probably the frogman in me, but I especially like to hunt dangerous game, an animal that’s capable of killing me if I screw up.

In 2011 I had an opportunity to travel to South Africa to hunt Cape buffalo. Long story short, when the moment of truth came, I was in the savanna, standing exposed in tall grass near the top of a hill, with one of those monsters just thirty meters away from me. My first shot didn’t do much to him, ripping his shoulder with a slug that would have penetrated an engine block. All it did was piss him off. He just shook it off as though it were a hailstone, then turned and started running away. Nineteen hundred pounds of fury went charging down the hill and into the thorns.

We set after him into the dense thicket of the valley below. He made such a huge swath in the grass that we felt like we were following a truck. But we couldn’t count on the idea that he’d always keep running away from us. Cape buffalo are known for drawing their pursuers into heavy brush, getting them hung up on thorns and briars, then charging back on them fast.

Once we were out of the high grass, the tracking got more difficult. The professional Zulu tribesman with our party was the best tracker I’ve ever seen. When we found the wounded buffalo the first time, I was impressed by his patience. I lifted my .416 Rigby to my shoulder and stayed on glass for twenty minutes, waiting for him to come into the open. When he finally did, I shot him again. This time the 10.57mm slug dropped
him—for a few seconds, at least. Then he was on his feet—and a bad feeling swept over me.

For a moment, I was afraid he’d charge. If he did, I’d probably have time for only a single shot before he reached yours truly. Even a perfect head shot might still allow his momentum to carry him into me. And if I missed, it was all over. A lion will kill you by raking you with his hind claws and biting your neck once. He’ll get it over with and go about his business. A Cape buffalo is different. He’ll mash you with the crown of his horns and keep pounding until he can’t feel you anymore. Your body will be jelly before he stops. There’s something exciting about that ferocity. That fear can get into your head and put a tremble into your scope.

Fortunately, this one had a different plan and we kept up the chase. As we closed in on him, I shot him four more times before he finally let out a death bellow. When the Zulu tracker went to make sure he was dead, he tapped his rifle barrel a few times on the animal’s eyeball. Even from a prone position these animals can be up and on top of you before you know it.

As we took our trophy picture, I tried to lift the Cape buffalo’s head for a better photo, but managed to get that giant skull off the ground only a few inches. It took a dozen men and a pretty big winch to lift his dead weight into the truck. Worn out by the adrenaline surge and torn up by thorns, I came away humbled by the power and stamina of this great creature. The feeling was indescribable.

This is what we live for, in the teams. Choose whatever quarry you like: the pursuit generates the fear, and the fear gives you the rush. And even after you come home, it’s hard to kick that addiction. Domestic life isn’t anything like what you find in uniform.
That’s one reason we try to vet our teammates’ girlfriends so carefully. We need to know they’re up to the challenge.

My mother says she gave two boys to the Navy and it gave her back men. When Morgan and I were first in the teams, life was simple. Our leaders would take us somewhere and point us in a direction, our only purpose in life being to hit the target we were shooting at. If the chief or LPO said, “Okay, point man, we need to get from this outpost to this house,” well, roger that, sir. We had a straightforward job to do.

After a couple of deployments and a couple of promotions, it was a different deal. We learned to see the big picture. We understood our missions in detail and also in context. When we went after someone, we knew not only who we were going after and what his location was but also who his associates were, who his wife and kids were, how many rings his wife wore, what kind of car he drove, where he worked, and where he used to work. We knew who his daddy, his momma, and his sisters, brothers, friends, and friends’ friends were. We knew what questions to ask him to get where we needed to go. Knowing all that, we could turn him in circles with our terp in the interrogation room.

By the time you retire and slow down, you may wonder what you’re supposed to do with those capabilities. They don’t have a lot of use in civilian life. You need to find other challenges. But when you look around, you may find that the world doesn’t offer them. The world doesn’t understand who you are, what you’ve been doing, or what you can do. I wrote earlier about Master Chief’s job interviews, in which the interviewers clearly had no idea what kind of man they were talking to. Morgan knew the score and didn’t like the thought of making the transition, either.
Working that desk job in Virginia Beach prior to retirement was miserable, mind-numbing duty.

There were days when I wished my body would whip itself back into fighting shape so I could get back on line and reengage with the guys. But that wasn’t my destiny. When I came home, I was blessed to have a course of action set before me: bring the actions of a few to the attention of many. Too many of us who leave military service come home to a life without enough direction in it. I found mine thanks to the Naval Special Warfare community, my friends, my foundation, and my wife and kids.

It’s funny how serving your nation makes you part of something larger than yourself but also sets you apart. You realize this when you come home and find so many people who know what you’ve done but can’t personally relate to any part of it.

The military now stands apart from average Americans’ lives as it never has before. About 1.4 million people are on active duty in our armed forces today—about half the number that were on active duty fifty years ago. About 2.4 million have served in the Global War on Terror, as it’s known. That last number sounds pretty big but it’s just 0.77 percent of America’s population of 313 million—a truly shocking instance of the “1 percent versus 99 percent” problem. In Congress, where our political decisions are made (or not), only 21.8 percent of our representatives have served in the military. That’s down from 74 percent in 1971, when the numbers were pushed up by the draft. That was also a time when you didn’t need to be wealthy to run for elected office and most congressmen understood that the term “enemy”
referred to someone with a gun on the other side of a demilitarized zone, not someone in the opposing political party.

Today, we don’t need to be trivializing war when we’ve had about 6,200 men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past ten years. Overall, we’ve lost 391 special operations personnel, and at least 1,820 more have been wounded, according to SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and the Department of Defense.

Military life and culture seem to be foreign territory for many of the people who write for national magazines and newspapers today. Every time they refer to Navy SEALs and other SOF outfits as “Special Forces,” which only describes the Army’s Green Berets, they reveal themselves to be as ignorant as someone who doesn’t know, say, a Shia Muslim from a Sunni. Recently, in a well-attended forum at a public university, a prominent journalist referred to the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite command that carried out the bin Laden operation, as “an executive assassination ring, essentially” for Vice President Dick Cheney. The fact that the guy who said this has a Pulitzer Prize might confirm your worst fears about those who write “news” for a living. (Naturally, in the same presentation, he also referred to special operations units as “Special Forces.”)

Those who serve in the military are the best of us. They’re capable, honorable, and less likely to be hung up on material belongings or themselves. An Iraqi military officer doing training at a U.S. base was asked by a journalist recently what he thought about Americans nine years after Saddam was taken down. “You are a better people than your movies say,” he said.

Yet for all the interest in the stories of our heroes at war, as reflected in Hollywood grosses and the bestseller lists, the military
still seems to be more isolated from most Americans than ever before. The Army was basically a citizens’ militia when our nation broke free of England’s tyranny. Today we have a thoroughly professional volunteer force. It’s also a caste that stands mostly apart from civilian life. I’ve heard it said that the members of our military are like sheepdogs in a world full of wolves. If that’s the case, not enough people have direct experience in the pasture. Most people don’t pay much attention to the sheepdogs until the wolves come calling.

People who don’t know our military very well sometimes seem amazed whenever men like Jordan Haerter and Jonathan Yale make the headlines. On April 22, 2008, those two enlisted Marines were standing watch at a checkpoint outside a joint U.S.-Iraqi barracks in Ramadi when a large truck began accelerating toward their position. Their checkpoint controlled entry to a barracks in the Sufiyah district that housed fifty Marines from the newly arrived First Battalion, Ninth Regiment. They were alert to the VBIED threat and quickly and accurately assessed the situation before them—all the more impressive given that the level of violence in the city generally wasn’t what it had been a few years earlier. Both Marines opened fire immediately, Haerter with an M4 and Yale with a machine gun. Still the truck rushed toward them. Nearby, dozens of Iraqi police fired on the truck as well—but only briefly before their instincts for survival kicked in. Expecting a huge blast, they fled the area. But those two Marines stood their ground, pouring fire into the truck until it coasted to a halt in front of them—and exploded.

Later estimates pegged the size of that IED at two thousand pounds or more. The blast damaged or destroyed two dozen houses and knocked down the walls of a mosque a hundred yards
away. An Iraqi who witnessed the attack, interviewed by a Marine general afterward, choked back a sob and said, “Sir, in the name of God, no sane man would have stood there and done what they did. No sane man. They saved us all.” Lieutenant General John F. Kelly, who investigated the incident to document the Navy Crosses they were to receive, said, “In all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording [of a security camera nearby], they never stepped back. They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder-width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could work their weapons.” Yale, from Burkeville, Virginia, and Haerter, from Sag Harbor, New York, were decorated in 2009 for their steady nerves and heroism in the last six seconds of their lives, saving at least fifty people living in those barracks in the process.