The Operator Page 12

  The pilot was this very cool Marine captain we flew with a lot. Those old Hueys had windows that pushed down like on a school bus—you squeezed the clip that retracted the lock and pushed them down. He’d be flying the thing while chain-smoking cigarettes and tossing them out the window as we were blasting away at the barrels. It was very white trash, and a hell of a lot of fun.

  While the pilot was smoking and we were shooting, all of a sudden we heard this loud boom. I instinctively turned to look in the direction of the sound and saw ragged remains where the engine had been. I did the math, and it didn’t take long: There was only one engine. I looked back at the air crew chief. He was strapping himself in. I looked at the other sniper. He was peering out through the door as if he was thinking of jumping. I knew I had to make a decision: At what point do I jump? Did I want to risk getting caught in an exploding helicopter or was it better to take a long leap into the ocean? I looked again. We were clearly too high, at least five hundred feet. There’d be no recovering from a jump like that.

  The first thing this Marine pilot did when he heard the boom was calmly put his smoke up to his mouth, take a final, long drag, exhale, flick the butt out the window, and say, “Fuck.” Then he set about maneuvering his crippled bird toward our ship, which seemed a long way off to me. He kept yanking all his levers and practically willed us toward it. The vessel came up fast but we were falling faster. The chopper hit into the stern with barely enough altitude to skid forward instead of slamming into the hull and falling into the ocean.

  We all climbed out, unhurt. The bird was down for a while but somehow they got it back up. Mechanics are awesome.

  The next week, we were at a base in Italy doing exercises in old Navy H-53s, the big, oily helicopters with the huge rotor. Our ship had left port without us, and we were about to catch a ride on an H-53 to meet back up with it. We weren’t happy. Saving Private Ryan had just come out and we wanted to stay at the base and watch it. Our bad attitude must have been pretty potent, because the chopper blew an engine on takeoff and we had to crash-land right there. This crash happened too fast and too low to even think about jumping or take a final drag on a cigarette. There was another loud boom and the chopper just dropped straight down. We were able to soften the landing by utilizing “autorotation.” I’m not sure what that is but, like I said, pilots are cool. The good news was, we were alive and unhurt, and back at base just in time to catch the opening credits of Saving Private Ryan.

  Then, finally, we got a bit of real-world work. We’d been planning a big exercise in Albania when we got intelligence that al-Qaeda was plotting to attack senior officials there. I remember someone mentioned the name Osama bin Laden. The Navy flew us in to the embassy in Tirana, Albania, to help provide security. My friend Mike Johnson and I went on patrol on the embassy grounds. We were wearing plainclothes, just like in the movies, and I remember thinking how cool that was when a car rolled past the embassy gate spraying automatic weapons fire. It was just some punk kids making noise. The whole thing barely raised my heart rate. But that was the first time I’d ever been fired on.

  We ran at the car, but they took off.

  I didn’t have even a moment of hesitation about the possible dangers. We’d been training for this for so long. Even knowing a few guys had gotten hurt in Bosnia and Kosovo, you wanted to be one of those guys in the real action because they instantly get legendary status. I wanted to be that guy, I wanted to be the best one there.

  But I wouldn’t see any action, not on this deployment. When the big event finally came off—the president of Albania meeting with a bunch of admirals—they flew us in again. We found high ground on the roof to set up a sniper position, with a spotter across the way. I actually made a range chart so I would know how to aim at various potential targets if I needed to. I ended up with nothing to show for my prep work but the usual sunburn. That was the end of the deployment pretty much. When we landed back in Virginia Beach, the first thing we all wanted to do was go to Taco Bell.

  *

  IN EARLY 2000, I WENT on my first deployment to the Middle East aboard an aircraft carrier. The mission would make headlines worldwide. Here’s how it was reported in the Baltimore Sun:

  On a still night earlier this month, a Navy Seahawk helicopter sped across the dark waters of the Gulf of Oman and hovered above the Russian-flag commercial oil tanker Volganeft, anchored just off the United Arab Emirates. Suddenly ten SEALs—black-clad commandos carrying M-16 rifles and machine guns—clambered up to the deck and rounded up the crew. Scrambling up to the bridge, the commandos found documents claiming that the 4,000 metric tons of oil on board—the equivalent of 29,200 barrels—had been pumped in Iran. But satellite-based navigation records revealed that the tanker’s route began in Iraq and that charts of the voyage had been erased. Commandos interrogated crew members, who told different stories about their route and where they stopped in Iran. Evidence seized aboard the Volganeft on Feb. 2 included a sample of the oil. A US laboratory tested the sample. Several days later Defense Secretary William S. Cohen announced the results: The oil came from Iraqi wells, a flagrant violation of United Nations sanctions.

  I was one of those black-clad SEALs. It was the first helicopter-borne vessel boarding I know of. I trained for it, but had never heard of anyone doing it for real. My job as sniper was to stay in the hovering chopper and cover my guys as they were making their move onto the tanker. Of course, it was a merchant ship not a warship. I wasn’t sure if I’d have to blast somebody, but I was ready if it came to it. It was also one of my first experiences around interrogations. All we had to do was get them talking, and as the article said, they all had different stories.

  We took command of the ship and steered it to Oman where we turned it and the crew over to the authorities. This operation was supposed to be our little secret, but there we were on the news.

  The next year, we deployed to Kosovo from a staging point in Germany. Even though the conflict had ended in 1999, there was still a need for peacekeeping. We’d alternate different platoons from Germany to Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo, to conduct reconnaissance and surveillance. We’d hide in the mountains and observe the locals, making sure there were no signs of aggression. We learned two things: Clandestine R&S teams get compromised by unassuming locals most of the time, and it sucks to walk through minefields. Plugging your ears does nothing.

  *

  IN LATE SUMMER, WE’D JUST gotten back from Kosovo. I was sitting around the office with a half dozen of my teammates. We were looking forward to a few weeks of routine downtime: muster in the morning, PT, train a bit, and be done by 1600. Then we’d go back to our barracks, which had been upgraded for complete comfort over the previous year, clean up, and go to the Irish pub.

  I was thinking about a pint of something at the pub and typing an email to a girl I’d met in Lithuania to plan her upcoming visit, barely aware of a CNN financial report droning on the TV hanging from the ceiling. At 2:49 German time, the show transitioned from a commercial to a “breaking news” logo, and there was a stunning image of one of the World Trade Center towers in New York belching black smoke from a massive hole in its midsection. I stopped typing and watched, thinking, “What the hell?” A witness jabbered nervously as the tower billowed smoke. A passenger jet came slicing out of the flawless blue sky on the right side of the screen and flew directly into the second tower. A massive fireball rose up behind the streaming smoke from the first tower. The commentator, who hadn’t even noticed, or hadn’t been watching, continued his interview as if nothing new had happened. But we saw it. We saw it, but could barely believe what we’d seen.

  Everyone was going, “Did you see that? Did you see that other plane?”

  It couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds before someone said: “Osama bin Laden. This is al-Qaeda. We’re under attack.”

  I thought, Holy shit, our lives just changed, man. This is it.

  Like everyone else, we stared at the television the rest of the day.
We didn’t know how the world was going to respond. We didn’t know if we’d get the call: “Get your shit on and leave immediately.” But that didn’t happen. It turned out that a plan had to be pulled together first. Our deployment soon ended and we flew home. It was weird seeing all the flags flying and sensing everyone’s tension. Everything looked different now.

  *

  I’D NEVER REALLY PLANNED TO make a long career of being a SEAL, but things had changed. We were actually going to war. In fact, SEAL Team **** almost immediately flew out to Afghanistan. Soon after, they were working to bring down the Taliban regime—the same regime that had sheltered al-Qaeda as it trained its suicide soldiers and plotted against America. I wanted to join Team **** on the front lines of this new war. I put in my paperwork to apply for it, but first I had to do one more deployment with Team Four.

  It was an exciting time. We’d been training for this for years, and now the skills we’d worked so hard to obtain were what our country desperately needed. We pictured these assholes with the long hair and big beards we’d seen in footage of Taliban fighters, the mujahideen with their muffin-top hats and Kalashnikov rifles who’d chased the Russians back to Moscow. And now our guys were already over there in the mountains just fucking them up.

  We returned home from Germany that fall for another training rotation in Virginia Beach, and by March 4, 2002, we were gearing up for our own deployment to the Mediterranean. I was in the air loft at Little Creek, packing parachutes, when someone came in and said, “Hey, did you know Neil Roberts?” Neil was the second guy I’d met when I’d joined SEAL Team Two four years earlier, the guy who had so impressed me with his fitness and generosity. Right away I didn’t like the question’s past tense. “Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “They told us he was killed in combat.”

  We didn’t know the whole story, but rumors started to fly about how he’d fallen out of a helicopter that was taking heavy fire from rocket grenades on top of a mountain called Takur Ghar. People said the helicopter had to take a hard dive down the mountain, leaving him to fight it out by himself against a swarm of enemy.

  Operation Anaconda was the biggest pitched battle in Afghanistan since the failed attempt three months earlier to kill bin Laden, who’d been entrenched with his fighters in caves in the mountains of Tora Bora.

  By March, al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents had regrouped in the Shahi-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan. Our intelligence estimated that between 150 to 200 fighters were wintering there. This was only the first error of what would become an error-plagued operation. It turned out the real number was between 500 and 1,000, and they were expecting an attack.

  On March 4, Neil and his fellow SEALs were assigned the mission of establishing an observation point on Takur Ghar’s ten-thousand-foot-high peak overlooking the valley. Normally, they would have landed in a more protected area and hiked to the peak, but the chopper that was supposed to ferry them into battle had an engine malfunction. They had to wait for a replacement. Since they needed to achieve their position before daylight, they no longer had time to make the hike. Instead they’d land directly on the exposed peak, a much more dangerous proposition.

  An earlier flyby by an AC-130 gunship had reported that the peak was clear of enemy fighters. The gunship flew off to provide close support for another battle, leaving the mountaintop blind. When the chopper carrying Roberts and his team arrived shortly before 3:00 a.m., the crew observed footprints on the snowy peak, then an anti-aircraft gun, which opened fire. A withering hail from machine guns, automatic weapons, and rocket-propelled grenades blasted into the helicopter, damaging the engine and control systems. The pilot fought the dying hydraulics and the helicopter began to buck wildly. Roberts, preparing to unload, possibly slipped on some grease and fell toward the open ramp. One of his teammates saw him tumbling out the door and tried to pull him back, but ultimately Roberts’s own weight of two-hundred-plus pounds plus his eighty-pound pack and twenty-seven-pound gun were too much. He slipped from his buddy’s grasp. The pilot tried to return for him, but he could no longer control the craft and had to execute a controlled crash down the mountain, slamming to earth about four miles away.

  That Roberts survived the fall and continued fighting is suggested by a drone video feed showing a lone fighter holding off a swarm of enemies ninety minutes after he fell from the chopper, right up until he went down and was dragged away—just seconds before his remaining teammates returned in a second helicopter to attempt a rescue.

  Neil’s would-be rescuers landed in the same hornet’s nest of heavy fire as the first chopper. They were immediately pinned down and began taking casualties. Ultimately reinforcements, aided by air support, fought a furious seventeen-hour battle to take the summit, killing scores of enemy at the cost of six more Americans dead and four wounded. A helmet believed to belong to Roberts was found with a single bullet hole in the back. I doubt anyone will ever know all the details for sure, but we also recovered the weapon Neil was carrying—it was called a SAW, for Squad Automatic Weapon. We had it mounted above my desk as a memorial. The barrel is bent at a sharp angle—he’d fallen so hard it bent the damn barrel. It would have been useless when he needed it most, so he’d kept fighting with what he had, a few grenades and his pistol. When that ammo was gone, I have no doubt he fought with his knife until the end came.

  Before going on this mission, Neil had written a letter to his wife to be opened in case he didn’t make it back. In it he said, “Although I sacrificed personal freedom and many other things, I got just as much as I gave. My time in the Teams was special. For all the times I was cold, wet, tired, sore, scared, hungry and angry, I had a blast.”

  When I got the news that Neil had died that day, war became real to me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  To try out for SEAL Team **** I needed to fill out a form called a special request chit. You fill out a chit for everything in the Navy, from taking leaves to going on liberty to moving off base to even getting a tattoo. I guess I missed that last part several times.

  Anyway, you submit the chit to your leading Petty Officer who, if he approves it, submits it up his chain of command to the Platoon Chief, who brings it to the Command Master Chief. Each must agree that the petitioner has a good shot at making the team. If the Command Master Chief says you’re good, then the Commanding Officer’s going to agree, and you’re in. Not to the team, but to the screening process.

  The conventional SEAL teams are filled with tough, capable warriors. But they don’t have the experience and haven’t yet proven themselves to be the best of the best, the guys wanted for the most sensitive, secretive missions with the most at stake. The screening and training process take the better part of a year. There’s the initial screening, which determines if you’ll be selected for the more extensive screening that determines if you’ll be selected for the eight-month training/selection process that gives you a fifty-fifty shot at actually making it.

  So, piece of cake.

  Team **** conducts a few screenings every year. Guys have to complete a vastly amped-up version of the physical test that conventional SEALs have to pass. Every distance is longer, every time faster, and every exercise has more reps. It’s a pretty serious test. If you pass that, then you go before a board of senior officers and enlisted in a room where they grill you for an hour about your array of service medals, your tactics, your experiences, your bosses, your home life, your finances, and how much you drink—and knowing SEALs, they might find “only a little” as disturbing an answer as “a lot.” Basically, they want to make sure they feel comfortable with you before they invite you to an additional three weeks of screening.

  I sat before the screening board in late spring 2003 and was immediately intimidated. All the men staring at me had seen combat. Real combat. And they’d all lost men, brothers. They were more serious than the SEALs from my base, more professional. Older. They didn’t joke around, they cut to the point. Why should you be here? What do you
offer? You’re not trying out to be a Navy SEAL, you’re attempting to become a SEAL Team **** operator. Can you handle it? They even had the administrative chief in there going through my service record, making sure the ribbons I was wearing were in order and nothing was missing. Making damn sure I wasn’t wearing anything I hadn’t earned.

  I got invited to the class that began in March 2004. I had almost a year to wait as I continued going on training and a deployment with my conventional SEAL team. We cruised the Mediterranean hoping to get into the fight in Iraq, but it didn’t happen.

  By then, my living conditions in Virginia had improved considerably. I was sharing a kick-ass condo on the beach with two of my team members, impressing women, and generally living the SEAL dream. The winds of change blew in with a phone call from my sister Kelley, still living in Butte, who’d just bailed from a bad relationship and desperately wanted to leave town. I could relate. I said, “You know what you should do, just move in with me in Virginia Beach.”

  I flew up to Montana, fixed her car, a shitty little blue Nissan, and we drove back to Virginia Beach on an epic road trip. Before we even left town I discovered she had no money. Well, almost no money. She literally had one dollar. I said, “It’s bullshit I have to pay for everything, but you won’t spend that one dollar—on one condition. We’re listening to Elvis Presley the whole way.”

  So we did. We had fun on every mile and took our time. It’s a thirty-four-hour drive that we stretched over six days. In that week on the road, Kelley drove a whopping four hours total—so I could get some shut-eye. In those four hours, she managed to get a speeding ticket in Iowa and run the car into a ditch in West Virginia. A deep ditch. A bib-wearing redneck showed up out of nowhere with a tow truck, asking, “Y’all need a tow outta that ditch ’er sumthin?” Kelley, pissed off and embarrassed, said, “No, bro, I got this!! … Of course we need a tow!”