The Operator Read online

  The mountain was nothing like I was used to in Montana. It was a mix of dirt and rocks with little vegetation, and steep as hell. Lone Survivor, the movie version, prettified it. The mountains didn’t look like that at all.

  We labored up some ancient goat path that resembled an insanely steep flight of stairs that some lunatic had made, switching back, but always up, up, up.

  That and the intense heat got to guys quick. Before long, one of the medics started handing back his gear because he couldn’t carry it anymore. Guys were like, “What the fuck? We’re not carrying this shit.” Some were even ditching ammunition to lighten the load. As the day wore on, it got so bad that some of the donkeys refused to go any farther, and when we prodded them, they veered to the side and leaped over the nearest cliff. They sure as hell didn’t want to be there anymore.

  Everyone was so dehydrated that I knew we were going to lose people soon. We’d pull up by a bush or anything I could hang an IV bag on and I’d start sticking guys to keep them from going into heat stroke. Their veins had shriveled so small due to dehydration that it was a struggle to get the needle in. When I finally did it and squeezed the IV bag, I saw their body suck up the juice. I wasn’t a medic but had learned how to do that in training. I must have given seven or eight IVs, but it wasn’t enough, and we had to medevac some guys out. Only the little white pills someone was handing out kept us going.

  About ten hours into the hike, we stopped for a break. I was sitting with two or three other SEALs, and it just hit me. I said, “Hey, did anybody call home before we got up here?”

  They said, “Well, no, what do you mean?”

  “Well, shit,” I said. “All our wives in Virginia Beach are going to know a bunch of SEALs from Virginia Beach just died and they haven’t heard from us.”

  I wasn’t wrong to worry. Back home, Nicole was at our friend Karen’s house. Karen was now a widow. Her husband, Jeff, was one of the SEALs who’d gone down on Turbine 33.

  The somber men in the blue uniforms had come to the house and told her, so of course she was freaking out. Karen and Jeff had only been married a couple of months at this point. Nicole couldn’t do much to console her—if you want to know what inconsolable really means, this is it—but she didn’t want to go home because she didn’t want those same somber men in uniform to be waiting when she arrived. She stayed there with Karen as long as she could. My daughter, who wasn’t even one, was with her. Eventually the baby just had to go home.

  Nicole made a long, horrible trip home at very slow speed, dread chasing every rotation of the tires. When our place came into view, the driveway was empty. No Navy officers waiting with terrible news. She breathed a huge sigh of guilty relief—guilty because she’d been spared and Karen hadn’t. She got out of the car and walked into the house carrying our daughter on her hip. As she juggled the baby for better balance, a bib slipped out of the bag filled with baby shit. My wife didn’t notice. She walked into the house. Closed the door behind her. Locked it. She’d escaped to this point, and could only pray a dead bolt could somehow keep the bad news out.

  Still, she didn’t feel safe. She just started pacing around the house, waiting for a knock on the door.

  Meanwhile, my neighbor Ron had seen the bib drop in the yard. He decided to be a good neighbor, go out, pick up the bib, and bring it over to Nicole. The problem was, Ron worked with me. He was in his uniform.

  He grabbed the bib and brought it to the front door. He rang the doorbell. Nicole looked out and saw a man in his blues. This was it. She set our daughter against a wall in the corner. The baby couldn’t sit up by herself yet, and Nicole was thinking ahead: She didn’t want to drop her when she fainted.

  Then she walked to the door. She later said they were the hardest seven steps of her life. She … well, I’ll let my neighbor Ron finish the story:

  “The door opened and I said, ‘You dropped this.’ She punched me in the face and closed the door.”

  This is what was going on at home while I was up on that mountain, taking some of the hardest steps I ever had to take.

  When we got to the top of the mountain we heard that the command had finally decided they could start flying guys in from Bagram to secure the crash site and recover the bodies. I never learned what made them reverse themselves. By this time we’d heard that Axelson was missing, possibly dead. The fate of the others was still uncertain. We turned around and headed back down the mountain to come up with a search plan.

  It was night, and we began picking our way down in the dark. As we were descending we spotted a fire near the mouth of a cave. With our night vision we could see some men around the fire. Taliban, obviously. Probably the dudes who’d shot down Turbine 33. We called Bagram for an air strike, but nobody would authorize air support. They actually told us, “We’re not saying there are women and children in those caves, but we can’t prove that there aren’t.”

  We’d just hiked ten thousand feet in a hundred degrees. We weren’t about to let some jackasses sitting safe in the ops center beat us. We kept on them, and somehow persuaded them to engage. We called in A-10s. That was the first time I’d seen A-10 Warthogs get called in on guys. It was impressive. Those are big badass attack planes, a flying arsenal. They came in low, just tearing the sky apart, and opened fire right over our heads with their four-thousand-pound, seven-barrel Gatling guns. We could hear the bullets going supersonic: We heard them hit before we heard them shoot. It was all backward, just insane. It sounds like a big dragon flying over you, screaming and spitting fire. Warthogs 7, Taliban 0.

  When we got to the bottom we picked up our trucks and drove up to Asadabad to mount the search for the MIA snipers. By now, we’d been awake for two days.

  The villagers who were aiding Luttrell did so because of their commitment to the Afghan code of Pashtunwali—the obligation to protect strangers who enter your home. Even when Taliban fighters came to the village demanding they hand over Luttrell, the villagers refused, despite knowing that the consequence could be death.

  Ironically, one of the men who cared for Luttrell later said he was motivated by the same code that prompted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to bring down a US invasion on his country rather than hand over Osama bin Laden.

  While in hiding, Luttrell wrote a note that included his name, Social Security number, and some other minor information that let us know it was legit. By this point, we knew he was the lone survivor. An octogenarian village elder carried the note, stuffed inside his shirt, through Taliban-controlled territory to the nearest coalition military base. The Marines at the base brought the note and the old man to us.

  The man looked like every other man who’d lived in these valleys for ten thousand years: traditional white “man-dress,” dark suntan, wrinkled skin, a huge beard that men of his clan somehow manage to dye red, sandals, and a small white cap. He didn’t have eyeliner on, so that was one indicator that he wasn’t Taliban. He looked about two hundred years old.

  The old guy told us the name of his village, but we needed to know exactly where Luttrell was, in which house, so we could go snatch him. When we showed him a detailed map of his village, his eyes just got this wide, blank look. His family had lived there five thousand years, but he couldn’t recognize it on a map because he’d never seen a map. A map was an abstraction. We decided he might need to see the real thing. We sat him down in front of a computer and opened up some satellite images of his village. We might as well have showed him the face of Muhammad himself. This guy could not believe what he was looking at. He was so amazed at this technology that he got disoriented. Eventually, he settled down and showed us the house. A house anyway. We had to assume it was the right one.

  The fastest way to do this would have been to fly in and fast-rope down on the house. But we hadn’t been having good luck with helicopters lately. We said, “Hey, we’re going to drive in there, and the old guy is going to walk us right to Luttrell’s house. Then, we’re going to get him and bring him back.”
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  Simple plan, but we couldn’t sell it.

  All of us were like, “You’re kidding me. We have an American hostage. We’re going in.”

  Then they started saying the note was a fake because the T’s in Luttrell weren’t crossed, and it was all a setup for an ambush.

  Really? How about the fact his Social Security number checked out?

  The answer was still no. Normally, we would have done what they told us, but at this point we didn’t really care because we had an American, a sniper, a SEAL, wounded in enemy territory and we had to go get him. The Ranger major who was in charge of our outpost made the final call. “We’re taking him anyway.”

  I think the major eventually got banned from Afghanistan forever for that. But not that day. We put the old guy in one of the trucks and drove him toward the village.

  It was probably the worst drive I’ve ever made. The roads were full of huge bumps and bigger potholes, and we knew Taliban were all over the hills. When we got to a spot in some hills across from the village, we got out and set off on foot. The sun was up at this point—our third day without sleep—and the heat was unbearable. We ran into some Marines who’d come out ahead of us. We were able to move faster than them because they were all wearing full flak jackets and helmets. All we had on were T-shirts and a couple of rounds of ammo. I remember thinking, “God, those Marines are hardcore.”

  Even more hardcore was the old man. He was practically flying up the mountain. It was all he’d known his entire life. The mountains were just part of who he was. Of course he wasn’t carrying a weapon, and he hadn’t been awake forever, like we’d been. Still, we were all impressed.

  The terrain was almost as steep as the damn mountain, up and down, up and down. When we got to the final hill—one more climb and one more descent to go—one of my guys sat down.

  “You know I can’t go anymore,” he said. “I’ve got to stop.”

  Climbing in a furnace on no sleep is a bitch. I could relate. But on the other side of the hill, Luttrell was waiting for us.

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll just tell Mrs. Luttrell, Marcus’s mom, that we were this close to getting him but we couldn’t because you got tired.”

  He said, “You know what, you’re right,” and he stood up and started walking.

  I said, “Hey, do me a favor, bro. Tell me that exact same thing in about seven steps because I can’t go any farther, either.”

  But we kept going and made it to the top of the hill. By then, the commanders decided to try to send a chopper in to pick him up, but they wanted us to keep going, mission redundancy, in case the chopper got engaged by enemy fire and had to veer away. Just as we were starting down we got word that the chopper had made it in, grabbed Luttrell, and flown out. Luttrell was safe. Great. But we still had to get out of the valley.

  I looked at my buddy, and I said, “This is why SEAL training is so hard.”

  He said, “What do you mean?”

  I said, “If we wanted to quit right now, where the fuck are we going to go?”

  By the time we made it back to the truck, I may have been hallucinating, because on the way down I thought I saw some little Afghan kids. It was so hot I gave a little girl one of my water bottles. I watched in amazement as she poured the whole thing out on the ground—so she could play with the plastic bottle.

  That couldn’t have been real, right? But it was. Afghanistan’s a time warp and we were sleepwalking in the fourteenth century.

  We made the horrible drive all over again back to the base, then slept for twenty-five hours.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In late 2005, we were home in Virginia Beach when we got word that the guys from Army Special Forces had been getting hit hard in western Iraq. For a full year, western Iraq had been a total shit storm. They had lost an entire troop—twenty-five to thirty-five guys—to death and injury. They’d taken casualties in intense close quarters gunfights, and from suicide bombers.

  Iraq hadn’t been part of our deal—I don’t think an entire Team **** squadron had been there to that point. But now we were hearing people say, “We think we’re going to go to Iraq this time.”

  We’d seen some shit on our deployment in Afghanistan, but Iraq, that was different. We’d heard about the IEDs blowing guys up everywhere and all the suicide bombings. Hell, we’d seen it on TV. Even as it sank in just how dangerous it would be, we felt this rising excitement, almost as if we were being called up from the minor leagues. We were going to the Show.

  In January 2006, we flew in to Al Asad Air Base in far western Iraq, about seventy-five miles from the Syrian border. The base is a big, table-flat desert with rows of prefab buildings—big rectangular tin cans, basically. Right away we met with a whole range of Special Ops people who were there, and it quickly became clear that the reason for the high casualty rate was tactical.

  America hadn’t seen sustained, heavy combat since Vietnam, and Vietnam-era tactics were still ingrained in many military units. In Iraq, a lot of our forces were just running straight into a house and getting the fight on. That was bad enough. Even worse: Al-Qaeda had studied our tactics. They’d leave a door open, and when they heard the choppers, a couple of terrorists with machine guns would be waiting inside to gun down the first four to six guys in.

  It didn’t make much sense, but I was learning how hard it can be to resist the power of “this is the way we’ve always done it.” I’ve always believed that pairing old solutions with new problems is the worst way to run a team. Anyway, we started saying, “Why the fuck are we running into houses? Let’s slow down. Let’s change our tactics.”

  Our idea wasn’t complicated. We’d land some distance away, far enough so that the people at the target couldn’t hear the choppers. Then we’d walk our way in and either blow the doors or sneak into the house in total silence.

  We set up quarters in a former abandoned building on the base—one that had been transformed into a frat house by the Army Special Forces boys; raw space, but plenty of it. Each team had its own room. As we did in Afghanistan, we set about homesteading, building up our man cave with big-ass screens and workout equipment. We linked up the various rooms with Xboxes so the gamers among us could play Halo. At times, there’d be sixteen of us sitting in front of screens, using controllers to command monsters to kill each other. The guys who didn’t like video games could catch up on the latest Shield episodes, work out, or play cornhole, that game where you try to toss beanbags into a small hole.

  Unlike during my first deployment in Afghanistan, we were now on the strike teams, so our day began just as the sun was going down. We’d wake up, get briefed on the latest intel and possible targets, drink some coffee, and go to chow. It was always fun driving the truck with the team down to the Army chow hall, enjoying the contrast between all the standard-issue military guys and our bearded, T-shirt-and-blue-jean-wearing rabble. The food was good, and we were always joking around and high spirited. We were on a mission we believed in, doing something very few in the world could do as well as we could. And we had absolute faith in and love for everyone on our team. When we called each other brothers, we meant it.

  There were two new guys on our team whom I wound up forming a deep bond with. Jonny was a guy I’d actually met before in, of all places, the enlisted club at Fallon Air Station in Nevada, just south of Reno. I was still in SEAL Team Two at the time, training with Scott Neil, another friend who’d go on to do twenty years as a SEAL, retire, then, after surviving scores of combat missions, die a block from his house riding his motorcycle. Anyway, Scott and I were having a beer when this kid came walking in and told us, “I just finished Hell Week.”

  Scott and I laughed in his face. He was telling his lies to the wrong guys. If he’d just finished Hell Week he’d be in Coronado, not Fallon fucking Nevada. “You’re so full of shit, dude,” I said. Scott suggested that Jonny’s penalty for spreading his bull should be to buy us some beers.

  Jonny wasn’t lying, though. He’d been
a rescue swimmer—an awesome job that involved jumping out of helicopters into raging seas in the most dire circumstances—and Fallon was where he’d trained with his air crew. Given a few days of leave after Hell Week, he’d flown up to see his friends in the helicopter squadron. Once we decided Jonny was for real, we bought him some beers and had a great time.

  His full name was Jonny Savio, and he looked like a typical Italian boy from the New Jersey neighborhood. His Jersey accent had faded, but he still said “mozzarella” like he was from Sicily. He was good-looking, dark-haired, perfect hairline, with very little space between two aggressive eyebrows. He dressed sharp and wore sharp shoes. The ladies always seemed to appreciate that. He was single, but unlike most of the single guys he always took care of himself and his money. He was squared away in every respect. His gear, his house, his car—always immaculate. He knew wine, was an excellent cook and a better friend. In the years ahead, we’d become close. If I was out of town and someone was giving my wife a hard time, I could call him and he’d fix it. If my sister was lonely, he’d take her to a movie.

  He wasn’t the super physical type, never a top one-percenter, like the freaks who ran sub-five-minute miles. But as far as tactics, he was top-notch, knew everything down to a science.

  Jonny checked into SEAL Team Two about seven months after we’d met, and we became good buddies there. He entered selection training about a year after I did, and ended up being No. 1 in his selection class. My squadron had first pick in the new operator draft that round, and we snapped him up.

  I was glad to have him with me on my first deployment to Iraq.

  The other new guy I wasn’t so sure I was glad about. Not that Andy wasn’t a great guy. He was English, a transfer from the British Special Boat Service. He was another “No. 1 in his class” type, just a tip-top, awesome operator. But he had a reputation among the Brits for having a war cloud following him. Everywhere he went he got into some huge battle.