The Operator Read online

  Enjoy paradise, gentlemen.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By 2006, I had a house, a mortgage, a wife, and my kids. For the next six years, I also spent an average of 325 days a year away from home, either training or fighting. It was a life that all SEAL Team **** wives were used to, and they were really good at supporting each other. But it was also a life that I knew my wife, on a tough day, could sum up in a single sentence: “He was never here.”

  I don’t mean to say she didn’t appreciate those forty days a year when I was around—twenty on leave and twenty working twelve-hour days but home by 5:00 p.m.—or the roughly $75,000 pay that came our way, or the housing allowance that helped pay the mortgage. And I don’t mean to suggest that she didn’t support the work I did but couldn’t talk much about. I just want to acknowledge the very large sacrifices made by my wife and children, and all the families of my fellow SEALs. For most Americans in 2006, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had receded to faint background noise on the evening news, while for our families it was a constant roar of absence, and the ever-present threat of a more permanent vacancy.

  For me, far longer than I or anyone could have imagined, the sound of war was the thumping of helicopters, the chatter of automatic weapons fire, and the voice of a SEAL sniper in my ear alerting me to some mujahideen in the next room waiting to blow my head off.

  And in the fall of 2006 in Afghanistan, one almost did.

  We were operating out of Camp Chapman, near Khost in eastern Afghanistan, the place where three years later a man American Intelligence thought was working as a double agent for our side would kill seven contractors and agents with a suicide car bomb. After the briefs that provided our targets, we’d drive out in Humvees with Army Rangers riding shotgun, Carl Gustav at the ready, just in case precision didn’t get it done.

  One night our target was a large compound—nothing unusual by Afghan standards, but hard for Americans to picture. Think part crossword puzzle, part Ewok village. Inside high outer walls was a maze of structures intersecting randomly in a pattern that, from above, would look like the layout of a crossword puzzle. The meandering arms of the crossword were a series of rooms surrounded by a wall. At the heart of the compound was a two-story windowless structure. Hallways wound around, seemingly pointlessly, like a maze. I knew right away it would be a nightmare to clear.

  One guy on this mission with me was my friend Lance—still renowned for his infamous “good yard gone bad” patching ceremony. Lance’s misadventures hadn’t stopped there.

  Lance was an amazing guy. We nicknamed him the Cobra because he was wound tight and seemed always about to strike. He also had this quality we called “the Lance factor,” a tendency for harrowing near-misses in which he’d almost die, but emerge without a scratch. His death-defying incidents became so common that we almost expected them. Seemed like someone was always saying to him, “Jesus Christ, Lance, how did that just happen?”

  In Iraq in 2005, Lance had been taking down a house filled with terrorists during a night raid when he fell into a swimming pool. Iraq was the last place you’d think you’d have to worry about swimming pool hazards. But it was a serious situation. His gear was so heavy, it was dragging him under. He told me he was holding his breath trying to swim out—a miserable training exercise come to life—when he saw a live, sparking power line hanging down about to touch the water. As he was wondering whether he was going to drown or get electrocuted, his vision narrowed to a tunnel. Just before blacking out he looked up, and at the end of the tunnel looking down at him was his buddy with this half-perplexed, half-horrified expression that said, “WTF are you doing in a swimming pool?”

  Lance told me the worst part was thinking that the last thing he’d see in life was his buddy looking down and pointing at him, almost laughing, saying, “Oh … my … God!”

  Lance couldn’t remember swimming out, but he did, alive and unhurt, of course.

  Everyone loved Lance, myself included. He was meticulous about everything: perfect locker, perfect uniforms, perfect tactics … just unlucky.

  Another time, we were skydiving in Arizona and Lance was serving as jumpmaster—emcee of the proceedings. It was his responsibility to set a drogue chute for a pair jumping in tandem. One was a tandem instructor—it happened to be the super sniper Greg—and the other was a guy doing a tandem jump for the first time. Two guys hooked together in tandem fall faster than single jumpers. The function of the small drogue chute is to act as an air brake, slowing them down enough so that everyone can stay together. Lance’s job was to hold the drogue as the tandem pair jumped clear, set it, and let it go, then jump himself.

  But Lance jumped too soon, tumbling into the still unfurling drogue chute and getting tangled in its cord. Now they were all screwed. If Greg pulled the main chute, it would wrap around Lance and all three would plunge to their deaths. As his altimeter spun crazily, Lance struggled to free himself. At the last moment, he worked his way out of the tangle, pulled his chute, and jerked clear, allowing Greg to pull his chute, thus saving the life of one of the highest performing snipers in American history.

  When they touched ground safely, the first-time tandem jumper began to dance around and celebrate his first jump until he saw two ghost-white faces beside him. The entire time he’d been blissfully oblivious to the fact that he was seconds away from death.

  So with Lance beside me in this maze of a compound, I maybe should have expected some near miss. We were halfway through clearing one of the houses when multiple shooters opened fire. At Lance, of course. Now we were in a gunfight in this maze. It took us a while, but we killed the two guys shooting at us. Still, one room remained uncleared. It was at the end of a long hallway, breaking off at an angle. There was no door, just an entryway partially blocked by a fence. The entryway was in the corner, so most of the room could not be seen from where we were, and might be harboring more bad guys.

  We stepped over the bodies of the fallen gunmen and moved ahead. Some guys peeled off to go down another hall, and I found myself in the number one man position. It was now my job to come around that fence into the room first.

  Angles were what I was thinking about as I prepared to enter the room. I could already see the corner in front of me was clear. I’d need to slowly “cut the pie” from left to right and clear as much of the rest of the room as I could from the hallway. In that situation, you can only cover 170 of the 180 degrees of the room. That last ten degrees, the sliver between the entrance and the far wall, is blind. Too bad. Nothing you can do about that. At some point you just have to commit, take a sliver of risk. And the enemy knows this.

  Some bad guys knew to hide in that ten-degree blind spot, waiting for us to step in. That possibility is a real pucker factor, and a lot of guys have been killed that way.

  When I felt the squeeze from my two man, I stepped in. Immediately I heard pffft-pffft-pffft—three shots from a silencer-suppressed gun. With a startling thunk an insurgent fell out of the wall and hit the floor, still clutching an AK-47. He was bald, shirtless with white pants, and very recently deceased. It was a surreal moment. My brain scrambled to put the pieces together and soon I had the whole picture. This guy, still in his pajamas, had been wakened by the gunfight. He’d scrambled out of bed into the hidey hole he’d predug into the wall—precisely in the blind spot. No accident. As I said, these guys studied our tactics. He was going to ambush the first guy in. That would be me. I instinctively looked up to the roof of the two-story structure. It was Greg. Of course it was. He was standing up there with his gun slung over his shoulder, staring at me like some kind of war god. We used to call him Hoff—after attractive Hollywood actor David Hasselhoff—because he was so annoyingly good-looking. He clicked his push to talk and I heard him in my earpiece saying dryly, “Yeah, you’re all clear, Rob.”

  That’s when it began to sink in. Not that he saved my life; he’d saved my life plenty of times. What impressed me was that at a distance of thirty meters, in the dark, he
could tell who I was by the way I walked and by the gear I was wearing. It really sank in: Wow, we really do know each other. We really do have each other’s back.

  Not that SEALs are always perfect under fire. I’ve talked about how fast we move, and sometimes guys start slowing down a bit. We had a guy we had to fire just because he began to show the slightest hesitancy. We needed guys who, when it’s time to commit, commit. This was war.

  It can happen over the course of a couple of missions. Someone will say, “Hey, I noticed this guy and he kind of vanished.” We might bring it up in one of our periodic performance evaluations—nothing too formal, we just get together and talk about how we’re doing. Someone will say to the guy, “Hey, what’s going through your mind?”

  The decision is usually mutual. Guys will return to conventional SEAL teams or become instructors on one of the coasts. Sometimes they’ll leave the Navy altogether.

  There’s not a lot of blame or anger. Usually, guys know it’s time. We had a team leader who just sort of disappeared on targets. We didn’t know if it was fear or what. We went over his head, talked to his boss, and said, “We want to make you aware of it.”

  The boss pulled that guy aside and he didn’t deny it. He said, “Yeah, I’m kind of at the end of my career and this isn’t for me anymore,” and he stepped down and we got a new team leader. That sort of thing happens but it isn’t common. Most guys want to get in there and mix it up.

  *

  ONE OF THOSE MIX-IT-UP TYPES was Nate. Nate was among the most aggressive guys I’ve ever worked with, just an excellent SEAL, but he’d been on a couple of deployments and by this 2006 stint in Khost, had yet to shoot anybody. Just as we’d teased Andy the Brit for having a war cloud following him around, we kidded Nate for being trapped in a peace cloud. There was no reason for it, just happenstance, but it got under his skin. Nate wanted to join the club.

  One night that fall—it was actually Halloween—Nate, Lance, and I were taking down a house. We were shorthanded, so we decided to compromise on our usual tactics and take it down with just us three. Not ideal, but not all that unusual. We were often short manpower. Nate was the point man. When he entered, one of the targets lunged at him and they got in a fistfight. That woke up two other guys. With the night vision down, I could see them rolling over and grabbing their AKs. I don’t know what got into me, but before they could get their guns on us I yelled, “Trick or treat, motherfuckers!” and blasted both of them. It was the one and only action movie line of my career. Nate, who had this guy in a headlock, looked up and said, “God dammit, Rob.”

  “What?” I said.

  “You always shoot people,” he said. “I never get to shoot anybody. What the hell?”

  I said, “Well, I don’t know, throw that guy in the middle of the room and shoot him.”

  The terrorist’s eyes went wide. He looked at me, and he said, “No, no, sir, this is bad idea.”

  I said, “Who’s talking to you, dude?”

  I was messing with him—obviously we weren’t going to do that. We pulled him in for interrogation. We said, “Hey, we know this truck pulled in here at this time, because our assets were watching the house. Who owned the truck?”

  The guy was clever. He pointed at one of the dead guys and said, “It’s his truck.”

  “Good answer,” I said.

  We put a hood on his head and left the building so we could extract. Lance led us out and as he was walking through the yard a big, scruffy dog charged him without barking. He was fast. We heard over the radio, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Lance!” Bap Bap. It was Greg. He saw the whole thing and saved Lance from getting chewed on and, being Lance, probably getting rabies. Who goes to war and gets attacked by a house pet?

  *

  A YEAR LATER, WE WERE on a deployment together in Iraq. Nate still hadn’t killed anybody. We were out on a mission in central Iraq and the mujahideen were now sleeping outside in the palm groves under the trees because they knew their safe houses were no longer safe. This was one of many ways our dogs were useful; if the bad guys were out there, the dogs sniffed it out instantly.

  On this particular mission, we were out with Toby the dog, and his handler, Jimmy. Jimmy, like all the dog handlers, had special training and constantly worked with Toby to improve his work skills and their communication. It was a busy job—the dogs never stopped needing to be taken care of. Some guys loved it, and some didn’t. If they didn’t have enough volunteer handlers, they’d assign a new guy. We wanted to bring dogs whenever we could, so the dogs joined us about 90 percent of the time. The dogs would listen to all of us in a combat situation, not just their handlers, but you had to get their attention, either by using a laser pointer or calling the handler to bring the dog up. The dogs always listened to their handler first, the shooters second. They were incredible at going after military-age men and as a rule didn’t bite kids—though they could and did on some occasions. We’d always have a ’terp (interpreter) yell at the house, “Everybody out! We’ll send a dog in.” That mostly worked: noncombatants came out. But I’ve seen women come out, leaving babies in a house about to be cleared by dogs. You just had to shake your head. If the dogs bit the women, we’d bandage them up and give the family some money.

  On this night, Jimmy gave Toby his instruction and Toby, a lean and mean Belgian Malinois, took off down the path as we followed. All of a sudden, he darted to the right. We called him “the fur missile” because of the way he just launched himself after targets. He just blasted off into the trees and immediately had this guy’s arm in his mouth. The guy was yelling, trying to stand up and aim his AK-47 at this snarling predator, but Toby was vibrating with rage, hopping around, irrevocably clamped on the arm in his mouth. The two of them, man and dog, were locked in this snarling, screaming dance, and the guy began firing his gun. Bullets were flying everywhere. Nate was carrying an SR25, which is a big sniper rifle, much louder than the regular guns we had, and it wasn’t suppressed. Just as it looked like the bad guy might be getting a bead on poor Toby we heard Nate’s gun go off. Boom! The guy’s head split open. The guy dropped and Toby, his life saved, stopped barking. For a moment, there was this heavy silence, and then Nate said calmly, “I’ll be damned.” He’d finally gotten his first kill.

  There’d be many more that deployment. All that time we’d been learning and adapting to a tough, seasoned al-Qaeda enemy. They’d react to us, and we’d react to their reaction. We evolved and became the most lethal and stealthy team in modern history. And we were about to reach our peak.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was always a little strange to come home from war and go right back into the routine of our training exercises. That’s where I found myself in the spring of 2007, having a perfectly miserable day packing tandem rig parachutes. Tandems are huge and packing them involves stuffing a four-hundred-square-foot canopy into a bag about the size of my computer. And because this was SEAL training, they made it extra-special fun by making us pack them, then unpack them, then repack them, and then jump them. Then pack them, unpack them, repack them, jump them. It just sucked, and I was in the final steps, cinching the fucking thing down, when the pull-up cord snapped, and it all popped back out. I had to start all over. Again. Life could not get any worse.

  Just then I got a text from Nicole that said, “Call me.” I called her and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  She said, “I’m pregnant.”

  Okay, so maybe life couldn’t get any worse, but it could get vastly more expensive and immensely more stressful, and just catch you completely unprepared for another baby. It would all turn out to be one of the best insanely expensive and stress-inducing things to happen to me, but first I had to go back to war.

  The summer of 2007 was the moment the war in Iraq shifted: Up until this point, we’d been in a stalemate with no clear strategy. Gen. David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, would eventually get credit for turning the tide by bringing about “The Anbar Awakening.” The Sunni M
uslims, a power in the Anbar Province of western Iraq, had been hostile to the cause of unifying the country around the American-supported government led by their Shiite rivals, and they’d mostly sided with al-Qaeda fighters who were Sunnis.

  Petraeus got credit for engineering a Sunni change of heart and persuading them to turn on their al-Qaeda co-religionists. In fact, this was a partial truth: The Sunnis were aiding us now, but it wasn’t because of their love for humanity and a new belief in freedom for all. It was partially because of the famous “surge”—an increase of about thirty-five thousand in American troop levels. Enough al-Qaeda members were being killed that the rest of the Sunnis—many of whom had become both disdainful and fearful of al-Qaeda—felt they could now stand up to them. We killed more al-Qaeda fighters in these few months than at any time in SEAL team history. With us killing enough terrorists, the Sunnis “awoke.” We helped win the war, if this type of war can be won.

  By May of 2007 our numbers were growing. More SEALs were in the pipeline to begin with because they’d increased the number of people going through BUD/S. They moved Hell Week from the fifth week to the third, thinking that if guys were less broken at the start more would make it. Hell Week still sucks, because that’s the whole point of Hell Week, and I think 80 percent still fail to get through to graduation. But higher numbers in mean higher numbers out, and more conventional SEALs means more who may be elite material. By increasing our personnel count, the thinking went, we could increase the time all of us had at home. That didn’t happen. More guys were simply thrown into the action. It also meant we were pulling some guys right out of training to go to war. Even though there was no time for the usual selection period, some of these “newer guys” would turn out to be among the best warriors America has ever produced.

  I think of this particular period I spent in Iraq as “The Deployment That Never Was” because most of our squadron was sent to southern Afghanistan while one skeleton crew of SEALs headed to Iraq more or less under the radar. It was my immediate commander who made the request. This guy was smart. He knew his team wanted to kill bad guys, and being a small unit away from all our top brass in Afghanistan would free us up to do what came naturally by now without too much over-thinking. The troop commander’s name was Rich, and even though he was merely a lieutenant commander, he’d be the highest-ranked SEAL in Iraq. He was one of the best leaders I’ve ever known. His motto, which I’ve stolen from him, is, “Nobody ever worked for me. They worked with me.”