The Operator Read online

  When we got to Virginia Beach, I wrangled her a job at a sports bar called Hometown Heroes. I knew the owner, so I hooked her up. I swear I didn’t do it just to get an inside track with the cute young blonde named Nicole who worked there as a waitress, but I did ask Kelley to put in a good word. Nicole wanted nothing to do with me. Smart kid. Also fun, bubbly, and free-spirited. I pursued her for a long time with nothing to show for it. She didn’t even know what a SEAL was at first, so she had no idea how little quit I had in me. Finally she caved, probably just to shut me up. She also didn’t know how close I was to filling out a special request chit.

  We got married about a year and a half later and bought a house. I was starting to see the outlines of a different life, one with more responsibility.

  Selection screening began with more physical tests, even tougher than the preliminaries, but since the candidates were all seasoned SEALs, the main focus of the screening was on psychological evaluation—they needed to feel certain that a candidate could function at the highest level under the worst possible conditions, like if you fell from a helicopter on a mountain peak surrounded by heavily armed enemies. This was no joke.

  I made it through, and went on to the next phase. The first three or four weeks were devoted to skydiving. They switched it up later—made it the second training section—because the skydiving training was expensive and too many guys were washing out in the next part, which was close quarters combat. But I was happy to start by jumping out of planes. I was on a high to begin with.

  Immediately, I noticed we weren’t in Kansas anymore. We enjoyed the perks of SEAL Team ****’s budget, which meant that instead of leaping out of a battered Korean War–era C-130, as we did in SEAL Team Two, we were flying down to Arizona to a posh facility outside of Tucson.

  *

  WE STARTED THE DAY EARLY with a twelve-mile run, then spent the rest of it skydiving. We began with what’s called HALO—high-altitude, low-opening—jumps, which involve a very long free fall and the chute opening just high enough off the ground to keep the jumper in one piece. The trickier variant is HAHO—high-altitude, high-opening—jumps, which involve opening chutes almost as soon as the jumper has left the plane. Thirty of us would exit the plane one after another, pull the chutes, and try to get in formation as a troop—picture twenty guys under canopy, each guy ten feet behind and ten feet above the guy ahead of him. It’s what we call a “stack.” These chutes aren’t the traditional ice cream cone tops, but rectangular, almost like the wing of a plane. You can guide the chute, fly it. In HAHO jumps, it’s possible to travel in formation as a troop at a horizontal speed of twenty to fifty miles per hour (depending on the wind) and land ten miles away at an exact spot no one has seen before except on a map.

  A troop of flying SEALs is really cool, and really dangerous. The stacking maneuver requires extreme caution and rigid adherence to basic principles. For instance, whenever we’d do a HAHO jump, we always went to the right as we left the plane. Always. This was an unbreakable rule. We’d want everyone turning in the same direction. If two jumpers—each weighed down by about a hundred pounds of equipment—bump going the same direction, it’s scary as hell, but it most likely won’t kill them. If they bump going in the opposite direction, it’s catastrophic. In that circumstance, they’d hit each other at a speed of twenty miles per hour—equivalent to slamming into a brick wall at forty miles per hour. Both jumpers would die on impact, probably cutting each other in half. Even if the jumpers don’t hit each other, they can cross each other’s lines. Not good. They’d wrap up in a big ball of silk and plummet toward the earth thinking about how painful it is to get part of their arm cut off by constricting chute cords, and how it sucks that they only have forty-five seconds to live before smacking into the mountain.

  No matter what precautions you take, it’s just flat-out dangerous. Later in my career, we lost two guys in one month during jump training. We all felt the risk. After a while, though, you stop being scared, replacing the fear with a constant awareness that shit can really go sideways. Want to learn to accept your mortality? Jump in formation from planes in the total blackout of a moonless night, and do it repeatedly. The upside: It kept us well fed. After a day and a night of jumping, one of us would inevitably say, “We’ve got to have steak tonight because this could be our last night on Earth.”

  On one jump I was testing a new kind of high-performance chute, designed to move faster through the air. The chute was moving so fast, my head got pinned in the cords and I couldn’t get to the release. I was caught in this death spiral for a long time. It actually got to the point where I said to myself, If you ever want to see your family again, you need to get rid of this thing. It needs to happen.

  To this day I can’t tell you how I managed to get freed up, but I pulled and the goddamn thing flew out of there, this beautiful, fully inflated canopy. I looked at my altimeter and saw I was at about 4,500 feet. If I hadn’t pulled my canopy when I did, at 10,000 feet, and waited until the usual 5,500, I would have hit the ground before I ever got untangled.

  When I landed, I ran into one of my friends. He said, “You look like you just saw a ghost. What happened up there?” I explained it to him. I remember saying, “Jesus, we need to fix this or else someone’s going to die. We need to fix this system. These two don’t match up.”

  Only nobody did, and it would come back to haunt me in a particularly cruel way.

  But I survived that day, just as I survived the rest of the jump training—none the worse for wear and possibly a few pounds heavier from all those steak dinners.

  *

  THE NEXT PHASE OF TRAINING, the most famous and the most difficult, is called close quarters battle (or CQB) training. This prepared us for an intimate and especially dangerous kind of fighting—entering buildings occupied by an armed and very hostile enemy, often complicated by the presence of civilians and/or hostages. The target might be a house, a hotel, or a ship—all situations in which you have to breach exterior barriers and defenses, then operate in cramped spaces, any one of which can be a death trap.

  We’d practice our moves—like a violent, high speed ballet—hundreds, thousands of times.

  Instructors would be watching our every move. At the end of the day they read out your scores, lingering on every lack of awareness and every safety violation. At the end of the week they’d turn the tables on us, say, “Make a list right now: top five, bottom five in the class. Go!” I never had a problem ranking the top five because I could just look around the room and think, “This guy’s a stud, this guy’s a stud, stud, stud … ,” but then I’d get to the bottom five and think, “Shit, everyone’s good.” So I’d end up putting myself at the bottom and then just throw four other people under the bus. We all did that.

  It all gets in your head to the point where you’ll be having a great day, thinking nothing can go wrong, and then in a fraction of a second you fuck up, and they take your gun away and run you through it again, this time with a broom, just to make you feel like an asshole. You always know the next fuckup will get you booted—because guys were getting booted right and left.

  One morning, after a few hours of kickboxing, I was talking with a guy about what we were going to do in Memphis that night. It was Friday. All we had to do was get through a few hours of CQB; it had been a great week and it was almost over. In the fourth room on our last run, we were on the same wall after coming through a corner door. We turned right. Two other guys were on the opposite wall. There were three toilet stalls in front of me with the doors closed. Simple: I walk to them, open the door as I lean my back against the wall, one of the guys on the opposite wall shoots if there is a threat inside. Repeat on the next stall. Repeat. Simple. The only problem was, when I opened the first door, my buddy right behind me took three shots basically right next to my head. The bullets went inches in front of my face. Three times. I took a deep breath, exhaled, looked him in the eyes, and then looked at the two guys on the opposite wall. Their mouths w
ere wide open. They couldn’t believe he’d taken those shots. As I went to the next door, I pointed at one of the guys on the opposite wall and yelled, “You shoot this time!”

  “Cease fire!!” an instructor yelled. I looked up. He was staring down at me from his observation post in the rafters. “I’m sorry I didn’t stop that, O’Neill. When I saw him shoot, I swallowed my whistle.” He pointed at me and the two guys on the far wall. “You three, get out of the house!” Then he pointed at my buddy. “You!! Unload your weapon and stay behind!”

  He was on a plane home that afternoon. I never saw him again.

  It’s all a well-thought-out strategy. They want to know: Are you a person who can make a mistake under high pressure and forget about it? Or do you dwell on a mistake and then make a bigger mistake? Are your wounded ego and self-doubt going to jeopardize the entire team?

  We need someone who can make life-and-death decisions rapidly and keep moving no matter what. One of the ways I like to put it is: The instructors take the stress of combat and try to put it in a training environment. Because it’s not actual combat, just training, people can more easily see that the stress is in their head, self-induced. But that’s entry level: Ultimately, SEAL commanders are trying to find the people who can realize that all stress is self-induced. Even when bombs are going off and people are trying to kill you. Worrying doesn’t help keep you alive. In fact, it can get you killed. Can you put that bag of bricks down and forget about it, or are you going to let it ruin your day?

  In CQB especially, it’s very important to understand what your buddies are doing, where the team is going, what makes the most sense. Communication, not talking, is key. It is a very difficult process that will get you fired if you screw up. There isn’t time for people who can’t think fast or who cave to pressure.

  *

  BY THE TIME WE FINISHED training, I thought it wasn’t possible that we’d get any better or faster. I’d soon find out how wrong I was.

  Another cool part of training took place in Washington State at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school. The highlight was a war game exercise. The scenario: We were told one of the squadrons was going to jump into a hostile country and we were supposed to get to the drop zone, meet up with them, and drive them out. We had maps of the fictional city and a dossier of briefing notes concerning logistics, local government agencies, and communications. As we were driving in, we were pulled over by a fleet of screaming police cars. Officers in foreign uniforms yanked us out of the car at gunpoint and shoved us into vans. These guys were totally into the role—waving their guns dangerously and screaming at us with heavy foreign accents, even babbling among themselves in some strange language.

  They brought us in, separated us, and aggressively interrogated me. This is one of the schools where they’re allowed to put their hands on you, so they slapped me around, beat me up a bit, put me in cuffs and a prison jumpsuit, and locked me in a cell. It’s not like a cell in an American prison. It’s about the size of a high school locker, barely enough room to sit down if you put your knees up to your chest. All they gave me was an empty coffee can to dump in. My guess is they kept us in there maybe two and a half days—but your sense of time is the first thing to go.

  Periodically, they’d drag me out for another interrogation. Sometimes I’d get the designated asshole and he’d smack me around, then throw me back in the cell. Sometimes I’d get the nice guy and actually find myself feeling a rapport with the guy. I’d think, Shit, this is real. Only later did I realize they’re teaching you how to do good cop, bad cop.

  Either way, I got thrown back in that school locker of a cell. I couldn’t sleep because they were playing these awful recordings of children screaming over and over, or when they weren’t doing that, this ridiculous foreign music I heard so often I began to think the words were English. I couldn’t see anyone, but I began to think I could recognize my buddies by their coughs, so I realized, okay, my friends are here, and we started trying to communicate as if we were real POWs. Our first attempts started out as knocks and then turned to whispers, coughs. The guards would get pissed but they couldn’t tell exactly who was doing it. One time I heard a guy yell “Noonan!!,” right out of Caddyshack. Hearing my bros laugh kept my morale high.

  They make you stand the whole time, but you’d hear guys sliding down the wall to the floor. Then you’d hear the guard outside screaming, and the next thing you knew your door was opening and someone was throwing a bucket of cold water on you. You’re thinking—maybe even saying: “What the fuck, man?”

  “Your buddy next to you sat down so we’re punishing you.”

  Soon enough, I’d hear the guy on the other side of me slide down and—blam!—the cell door was opening and again with the cold water. By this time I’d be exhausted from standing and not sleeping, and from freezing my ass off, too. This went on for hours at one point until I finally said to myself, This is bullshit, and sat down. The guard slammed open the door. “You’re sitting down! Pick a friend.”

  I said, “Fuck you, hit ’em both.”

  As I’ve said, I lost all sense of time, but it seemed like I’d been in there forever when they pulled me out again. I thought, here comes another beating, but instead they finally broke out of their roles and showed me around. I was still in some other reality even then. But they showed me an American flag and read off the Bill of Rights or some other patriotic shit. When I showed signs of coming out of it, they sat me down and showed me a compilation of my interrogation videos and took me through them point by point—what you’re supposed to say and not supposed to say, how to layer your story so that if you do lie, you can keep your lies straight. It was interesting, though I don’t think a lot of it is applicable because if we get captured we know damn well our head’s getting cut off, if the bad guys are nice.

  *

  ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH THE EIGHT months, we were training on a big Navy ship pretty far out at sea where we could blow stuff up and shoot live fire. The ship was sparse on amenities. In fact, there were no bunks—we just put a mat down in whatever cubbyhole we could find and slept in a sleeping bag. There was also no cell phone coverage. Very bad timing, since my wife was extremely pregnant. One morning, I woke up and was getting ready to train when the Master Chief of the class came up to me and said, “Hey, O’Neill, you’re out of here.”

  My jaw dropped and my eyes blazed. I said, “What the fuck? We didn’t even start training! I’m out? What did I do?”

  He said, “Oh, no, no, no. Nothing like that. Your buddy called. Your wife’s at Portsmouth, she’s going into labor. We’ve got boats coming out to get you.”

  My first thought was, Oh, thank God I’m not kicked out.

  My second thought: Holy shit! I’m going to be a father.

  The boat they’d sent was damn fast, and we set some kind of nautical record hauling back into shore. I jumped into my car and broke every speed limit from there to the hospital in Portsmouth. I made the birth of my daughter with five minutes to spare.

  Fortunately, we were back in town for a week or two after she was born, so I was able to be there when my wife and daughter came home from the hospital. But I still had to get up for 5:00 a.m. workouts and then train straight through to 7:00 p.m. With a brand-new baby, it was like an hour of sleep at night and then freaking training. Hell Week all over again.

  Nicole really had no idea what she was signing up for when she married me. But she was cool with it. Her family was local, and we had a great support structure made up of the famous SEAL wives network. They were good at taking care of each other. Back then, not a lot of guys were dying in combat, so Nicole didn’t worry too much about that aspect of my job. As a new mom, she didn’t really have much on her mind besides that totally immersive experience.

  I successfully completed training by December 2004. We ended up with thirty-five guys out of the sixty or so who’d started. For those of us who’d made it through, squadron placement worked like the NFL draft: Each
squadron would get a turn to pick. The squadron that got first pick the previous year would pick last, and so on. Every squadron has members who help supervise the training, so they function as scouts, giving their group an inside scoop on the candidates. There’s also an official top-down list based on all the instructor evaluations, as well as those painful peer evaluations.

  We all went into the “draft” with a favorite squadron in mind. Maybe we already had friends there, or we liked the squadron’s reputation—each unit had its own characteristics. My quick take on it was that one squadron was known to drink quite a bit, be physically tough as hell, and smoke cigarettes. Another was the team that was the most likely to look out for their guys by telling senior officers and other services to go fuck themselves.

  The squadron I wanted was the work-through-lunch, get-off-hungry-type team. Hardworking, really professional—and combat hardened.

  The squadron was known for its exploits during Operation Anaconda and Roberts’ Ridge. Its snipers went back to the top of the mountain where Neil Roberts had lost his life and fought it out, nose to nose, with a determined enemy. Their reconnaissance guys got the drop on foreign fighters who were set to ambush American troops, and they also put guys in place to call in major air strikes that led to the eventual victory.

  If you wanted to see combat fast, they were your best bet.

  Yes, I was a new father with a very young wife. But what had all my years of work and training been about if not to avenge the deaths of Neil and all those ordinary Americans who went to work one morning and found themselves forced to decide between being burned alive or jumping from a smashed plateglass window a hundred floors above the street? I can’t tell you how many times the images of those tiny but obviously human figures free-falling helplessly from that burning tower played in my mind. And now, I was finally in a position to do something about it.