The Operator Page 11

  I checked in on a Friday, knowing it would be a short day and figuring it would give me a chance to orient before Monday. Christian, a buddy from Class 208, and I moved into a shared room in the Navy barracks because we weren’t getting a housing allowance and couldn’t afford any rent with our meager paychecks. We even ate at the Navy galley, not my first choice, but we were poor.

  When I walked in the first day I was still three months of additional tactical training and a two-hour oral exam away from being a full-fledged team member. That cocky self-confidence from getting through BUD/S and airborne school? Vanished. I didn’t know what to say or how to act around these guys.

  So, of course, the first SEAL I encountered just happened to be the biggest hard-ass of all the hard-ass instructors from my BUD/S training in Coronado: Instructor Woodie. Even his name sounded mean. He was a big barrel-chested dude, a complete physical phenomenon who emitted visible rays of intimidation. Just a legendary asshole at BUD/S. The standard punishment of making guys run from the “O” course over the dunes into the water to get wet and sandy wasn’t nearly mean enough for him. He would make us low crawl on knees and elbows like human snakes through the sand to the surf and then back a couple hundred meters, over and over, until men up and quit. There’s no counting how many SEAL hopefuls he managed to force out of the course like that, changing their lives, all because he was such a prick.

  Or that’s what I thought at the time. While screaming at us as usual one day he actually explained himself. He wanted people who could put up with the most ridiculous bullshit, who would never quit and would do anything to succeed, because the guys who made it through would eventually end up serving with him, probably in a war.

  When I walked in and saw him there, I might as well have been back in Coronado in the middle of Hell Week. Like an idiot I said, “Hooyah, Instructor Woodie!”

  He did a double take and said, “What the fuck are you talking about, dude? You’re in a SEAL team now, there’s no hooyah, there’s no instructor this. I’m Woodie.”

  I managed to say, “Okay, cool. Woodie,” but it took me a while to get used to calling him that. He turned out to be one of the nicest, most caring, big-hearted guys I ever knew. A true mentor with an infallible sense of humor, he was always willing to explain to a green kid tactics and how the teams worked.

  There was a refreshing sense of equality and mutual respect among SEAL team members—even between officers and enlisted men. We called officers by their first names and weren’t saluting them all the time. They were the ones with the college degrees—a guy had to have one to be an officer. But the officers recognized we’d been through something far more demanding than four years of college—BUD/S. When it came to actual missions, the officers were the organizers—and the ones responsible—and the enlisted men designed and executed the tactics. But there was a lot of back and forth between all of us. There were programs for enlisted guys who wanted to become officers, but I never felt the need, even though they made more money. I liked where I was.

  After Instructor Woodie—sorry! I mean, after Woodie, the second person I met was a guy named Neil Roberts. He had reddish blond hair like I did, and his name echoed mine in reverse. But I certainly didn’t take much from those trivial similarities. He immediately impressed me as the ultimate SEAL. He still held the record for the “O” course at BUD/S, and was always finishing first in the team workouts. He was something I could only aspire to: extremely squared away in every aspect, from his impeccable physical condition to how clean his locker was. Everything he did was done with efficiency and purpose. Right away he looked over my gear and explained what should go where and why, and what I didn’t need. A very serious but generous guy.

  That first day he took me to lunch at an Arby’s across from the base and treated me as an equal. Both the stacked brisket and onion ring sandwiches and his respect were unexpected treats for me. I remember thinking, These are some impressive people.

  On the verge of becoming a SEAL myself—the very cool official designation was Naval Special Warfare Operator—I was still naïve. I assumed what most people who’d never been in the SEAL teams did: that SEALs were busy all of the time going on covert ops. I pretty much thought that anyone in the building wearing a Trident—a gold pin with the eagle, pistol, and trident insignia—had several kills and probably a bunch of those with knives. In 1997, that was pretty much the furthest thing from the truth.

  No SEALs had seen real action since the invasion of Panama, when guys from SEAL Team Four got in a major gunfight on Paitilla Airfield going after corrupt dictator Manuel Noriega’s getaway plane. Three SEAL platoons had parachuted into the ocean with their inflatable boats, motoring the rest of the way to the airfield. Because their rules of engagement required them to challenge Noriega’s guard before shooting, they had to give away their presence. The Panamanians responded by opening fire from a hangar, killing four and injuring seven of the fifteen SEALs in the lead platoon. The Panamanians rushed in reinforcements to support their resistance, but were no match for the remaining SEALs.

  That had been in 1989, eight years earlier—the same year the Berlin Wall came down, and the beginning of an all-too-brief Pax Americana. Then some Team **** guys got in a few fights in Somalia during the Black Hawk Down days. Aside from some very peripheral involvement in the first Gulf War, that was about it. Even though the daily morning muster began beneath a sign that said, “Are you ready for war today? You should be,” SEALs hadn’t fired a shot in anger in years. But nobody ever admitted that around civilians, even to their closest nonSEAL friends. We’d pull the old “can’t talk about it” crap, leaving the impression of untold secret missions. We actually referred to the whole charade as “Living the Lie.”

  There is an old saying in combat units: “Train like you fight!” We used to make fun of it because we knew the truth. We started saying, “Train like you train!” because that was all that was going to happen.

  Anyway, when I checked into SEAL Team Two, I treated everyone with a Trident with respect, which was definitely due. Even if these guys hadn’t been shot at, they’d all gone overseas willing to fight. They just hadn’t been given the opportunity yet.

  During the first few months with Team Two we new guys were in a kind of limbo. We couldn’t become actual SEALs until we underwent thirteen weeks of additional tactical training, but the training classes only happened a couple of times a year, and we had to wait until a new one started. In the meantime we would work out every day with the entire team. This wasn’t the agony of BUD/S. We were rested and in shape, and the four-mile runs could end with several coolers of beer and a comedy-filled bus ride back to Little Creek. SEALs are very funny, as I was learning. I knew I needed to up my game.

  But Tuesday still sucked. Every Tuesday we swam two miles in the ocean no matter the weather. If it was a hundred degrees and sunny, we swam. When it was snowing with ice on the water, we swam. We all hated it to the point that it became comical to see what kind of excuses guys could come up with to get out of it. We saw it not so much as shirking as an ingenuity competition. If you were in need of a dental appointment, schedule it on Tuesday morning. Same with medical appointments. I always laughed when I came into the “Team Room” on a Tuesday morning and saw several guys in their cammies and not their PT gear.

  “Where are you guys going today?”

  “Dental!”

  Guys who hadn’t properly scheduled an appointment were expected to go to their lockers or “cages” and put on their wetsuits. This left time for an attempt at escape and evasion. Some guys walked into the locker room and just kept walking out the back door where they jumped the fence to the parking lot. Others hid in their cages; one cut a hole in the ends of three kit bags, then sewed them together, end to end. He could crawl in there and nobody would think to find him because it just looked like three bags on a shelf, all too small to fit a living human.

  Even if you failed to vanish, it wasn’t too late. We’d take a bus
to a spot near Lesner Bridge, then swim from there to the Chesapeake Bay bridge/tunnel. While the bus was loading, guys would pretend to urgently need the bathroom, then sit on the toilet until the bus left. They’d actually run after the departing bus in wetsuits, shouting and waving, pretending to be upset that they’d miss the swim. Hilarious.

  The platoon chiefs didn’t think it was quite as funny as we did. For our transgressions we’d see our weekend leaves canceled, and get bad evaluations. But, hey, we were creating a tradition.

  I discovered another fun tradition in those first days. With the entire team assembled, we new guys were asked to stand up front to “tell us a bit about yourself!” Before I could get out my full rank, the entire team yelled, “Shut the fuck up!!!” The more senior operators added their own random comments like, “Eat shit!!” or “Blow it out your ass!!” The guys laughed heartily. When the yucks died down someone piped up with, “Seriously, tell us about yourself.”

  Repeat.

  It was an extended and mostly good-natured kind of hazing. They called us “new meat,” or collectively, “meats,” and we just had to grin and bear it. After a few months, a spot in a tactical training course finally opened, and not a moment too soon. The thirteen-week course consisted of more advanced versions of the training we’d had in Coronado and on the island. We rehearsed combat diving in Puerto Rico, and land warfare, weapons, and tactics at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. Even after that, I was still on probation. The command observed everything from our social interactions with the rest of the team to how we performed in PT—including the dreaded two-mile swim. Which meant I wouldn’t be hiding in any tricked-out gym bags or riding any toilets. When the command thinks you’re ready, you’re given a two-hour oral exam in front of the senior enlisted SEALs. The test was intense, and took months of study. They could hit you with anything, or several things at once, like making you do a timed assembly of a machine gun while answering questions about the properties of electric versus nonelectric fuses.

  My board was nearly a disaster because I’m always such a smart-ass. That morning I was dressing for PT in the cage with a guy I hadn’t seen before. He was another redheaded dude, maybe ten years older than me. He said his name was Mark, and he asked if he could borrow a PT pad. I gave him one.

  I didn’t see him again until we were out on the obstacle course. We had a guy named Art who is one of those top one-percenters—just a complete freak of nature at everything he does. Swims fast, runs faster, excellent shot, all-around super SEAL. I was still trying to prove myself in this elite group, so when Art moved out front as usual, I took off after him. I busted my ass to catch up, but there was no way. When we got to the part of the course where you had to step in and out of a series of tires, I started skipping some, trying to make up some time. As we were running through a tunnel I heard someone yell, “Hey, you can’t skip any tires!” I looked back to see who the jerk was: Mark, the new guy.

  We make three big loops around the “O” course, and on the second loop Art and I were way out front, but I was still behind, so I skipped the tires again. Mark, half a loop behind us, coming the other way, saw this and yelled at me again, “I told you, don’t skip any tires.”

  “If you were fast enough,” I yelled back, “you’d have seen me skip every other monkey bar, too, asshole.”

  I finished the “O” course a close second and didn’t give Mark another thought. I was too nervous to think of anything but the impending test. Finally it was time. I walked into the boardroom and looked at the review panel seated before me. In the dead center of the panel was the redheaded guy, Mark. Turns out he was the incoming Command Master Chief, the new boss. I stood there, trying not to groan out loud. “It’s the guy who cheats on the ‘O’ course trying to get his Trident,” was the first thing out of his mouth. “Do you need to cheat to win, O’Neill?”

  “I do if I want to beat Art!” I was trying to be funny. Mark didn’t laugh.

  He grilled me pretty hard on that, but I got my Trident that day. I was now a Naval Special Warfare Operator, a hot-damn Navy SEAL.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It had been almost two years since I’d enlisted in the Navy, and I’d yet to set foot on a ship. That little gap in my nautical résumé would be remedied big time by my first deployment. We drove down to the Marine base at Camp Lejeune and boarded the USS Austin, one of three ships constituting the Mobile Amphibious Ready Group. The Austin was a classic Navy transport ship from the 1960s, 569 feet long with the capacity to carry almost a thousand troops. We set sail for Rota, Spain, and were out to sea for about fourteen days. Until then, I’d never been out of sight of land for more than a few hours at a time.

  We weren’t responding to any particular world crisis, we were just part of the projection of American military might around the world, something that is happening every minute of every day of every year. That’s the “Ready” part of Mobile Amphibious Ready Group.

  It was my first experience around Marines. I was impressed. Fresh out of SEAL sniper school at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, I’d learned how to shoot while accounting for wind and distance, how to lead while accounting for a moving target, how to determine distance by using tiny dots in my sight—called mil dots—and making quick geometric calculations, how to spot for another shooter by learning to actually see the path a bullet makes through the air, and how to camouflage myself and move stealthily enough to get within feet of the target without being seen. I got pretty good at all that, too, making top 20 percent in a class of capable snipers.

  But I had nothing on the Marine snipers. The sniper course that Naval Special Warfare puts on was designed by a Marine, Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, who may have been the most famous sniper in history with ninety-three confirmed kills in Vietnam and probably three times that many that weren’t officially confirmed. He once took out an enemy sniper at long range, striking him in the eye through his own telescopic sight. He perfected the art of stalking and camouflage. According to an obituary I saw—Hathcock died in 1999—he once covered a thousand meters of open terrain by crawling inch by inch through the brush, unseen even when he came within twenty feet of the enemy. He crawled for three days and nights, but he got his man, a Vietnamese general. The Marine snipers on the ship were right on top of all his methods, worthy successors. We had a blast talking about utilizing mil dots, reading range charts, and all the stuff that warms a sniper’s cold heart. Then we’d go up in helicopters and shoot at barrels floating in the ocean. Sniper bonding activities.

  As for the on-ship routine—the sleeping in tiny berths stacked three high, the constant rocking back and forth—I quickly got used to it. I even kind of liked it. I developed a real appreciation for the fact that there are people in the Navy who have harder jobs than SEALs. They bust their asses on those ships, working long hours with no recognition. Naval sea power and forward defense is the key to global stability. There are a lot of folks busting their butts every day with little thanks.

  A machinist, for example, will labor for a good portion of the day in the dark with the machines and the heat and then have four hours of watch. It made me think about something I’d noticed in BUD/S. A lot of the guys who quit were guys who’d never been to the fleet. The guys who’d seen life in the fleet were the last to quit because they understood what it was they’d have to go back to. That understanding helped me later in my career because I ended up doing two more deployments on Navy ships, and I’d always tell my newer guys, “Look, I had a tendency to be cocky when I was younger, too, but don’t give these guys shit on the ship. They work harder than you do.”

  Especially when at sea. As SEALs, we didn’t have a job aboard. They say that when you’re at sea, the acronym SEAL turns from SEa, Air, and Land to Sleep, EAt, and Lift. The ship had a cramped little weight room and a couple of treadmills. The rolling of the ship in the waves added an element of interest to running on the treadmills. Now you’re sprinting, now you’re running uphill, now you’re sprinting. We wor
ked out a lot. We played cards and board games. We didn’t have any video games then, and only very poor Internet, so email was rare. It was a cabin fever setup, but the upside was we got to know each other really well.

  And of course, we found creative ways to keep up our two-mile swim, because how would we carry out our “can’t talk about ’em” missions without regularly fine-tuning our swim stroke? In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, we lowered our inflatable boat over the side—not the small one we’d learned to love in Hell Week, but a big, semi-rigid boat about thirty feet long—and motored two miles away. Then all of us but the boat crew jumped out and swam back. It was badass out there. We’re talking about eight thousand feet of the cleanest water you’ve ever seen. Before we set off, one of the boat guys handed me a cigarette because I’d said I wanted to be the first guy in the history of the world to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I did it, too.

  After our sea voyage, since there was no war going on, we had a nice little tour of Europe, including Spain, Italy, and Greece. For this boy from Butte, Montana, that was quite an eye-opener. I got a kick out of all the little differences. This was before the euro, so each country had its own currency. Some had depreciated so drastically they must have been running the printing presses day and night. I loved pulling nine million Turkish lira out of ATMs.

  Our only mission was to engage in prearranged exercises with various NATO allies. Not that it was entirely risk free. Our training always involved an element of danger—and it would get even more dangerous in the future. On one exercise, another sniper and I went up in a Vietnam-era Huey to toss barrels into the ocean and shoot them from the moving chopper. We wanted to see how fast we could put enough holes in them to make them sink.