The Operator Read online

  It was a bit surreal for me. He looked the same as he had just a moment ago when he was alive: pretty colors and noble antlers. But he was dead, and I’d killed him. I felt a tug of remorse. He was a beautiful animal, gone now thanks to me. But I was also proud. This was Montana. Deer were for shooting. Everybody did it. Now I was part of the club.

  In the hunting seasons that followed, any residual remorse fell away. Soon it was a competition at junior high every Monday. “So and so got a buck.” The real prize was the bull elk. It always seemed that someone’s mythical uncle, or a miraculous shot from someone’s dad, had brought down a “six point” elk. (We score different out West—you count one side of the antlers, not both. A “six point” bull has twelve points total.) That’s an immense, swift, and elusive creature. They can stand five-feet high at the shoulder, and weigh almost nine hundred pounds. None of us had been good enough to kill such a bull. Some hunters had never even seen one.

  When I was lucky enough to see one and shoot one before I turned eighteen, I felt only pride.

  *

  IN THE FALL OF 1994, the year I turned eighteen, my dad introduced me to the first Navy SEAL I ever met. His name was Jim and I was impressed with him the moment I saw him. He wasn’t as big as I thought a Navy SEAL would be—an observation people make about SEALs all the time—but he was obviously in great shape. He had a clean haircut and a military bearing. What I noticed first, though, was his positive confidence. The second thing I noticed was that he always put on his seat belt. Here was this tough Navy SEAL who wasn’t afraid of anything, but safety always came first. He’d never been to Montana before but figured: Guns, mountains, how hard can it be? He embraced the challenge in typical SEAL fashion—got someone to drop him off in the outback, then stayed there for three days. He walked all over hell, never seeing so much as a mule deer. I found out about that and told him, “That’s not the way to do it. I got a spot.”

  The hike was only a little under a mile, but it was pretty much straight uphill and still pitch dark. Normally I’d take it slow, pause for a couple of breathers. Toward the top, every breath felt like sandpaper rasping my lungs, but I was thinking, This guy’s a SEAL. I can’t be a pussy. I need to walk, no breaks.

  He was on my heels the whole way.

  We got up there and got right into the elk—about forty of them right where I’d said they’d be. We didn’t get any, but when we got back down the mountain Jim said, “You ought to consider becoming a SEAL, the way you climbed that hill in the dark.”

  I was flattered, but I didn’t seriously consider it.

  Until my ex-girlfriend’s dad sent me not so gently into the night.

  *

  THE SUMMER AFTER I GRADUATED from high school I spent twelve hours a day, four days a week, shoveling crushed rock onto a huge conveyor belt in a copper mine facility, the almost total darkness relieved only by the beams of two little lamps on my helmet. I thought that would be good work for building my somewhat scrawny upper body, and I was right. But I hadn’t counted on breathing in metric tons of rock dust, or scaring the crap out of myself thinking of all the workers before me who’d slipped into the conveyor belt and been converted to human pulp. My night job delivering pizzas was like a vacation by comparison.

  I did think, briefly, about going out of town to college, though my idea of out of town was the University of Montana in Missoula, less than two hours down the highway. When it came to it, I just didn’t have the desire. Or maybe I didn’t have the courage. When you’re a small-town kid from Montana, there’s this sense that venturing into the big, scary outside world might pulp you as surely as that conveyor belt. Montana Tech was the safe alternative. I also had a better chance of making the basketball team there. I was a good high school player, but at 6′1″ I wasn’t high enough off the floor to impress at the college level. I figured I’d play my ass off on the practice team and work my way in. It went well. I had a great time, got in great shape. Physically. Mentally, well there was the girl.

  I know now it wasn’t just that. I’d just finished my first year of college basketball and was feeling burned-out. Not with playing but with the concept of practice, practice, school, and practice. The grind probably wouldn’t have gotten to me if it hadn’t been for the girl. I couldn’t seem to get over her, and she was still in town—I could bump into her anywhere. I knew I didn’t want to find myself on a barstool at Maloney’s every night drinking to forget. I could already imagine the rut I could dig. It was time to do something.

  My first thought was of Ben and Jim, two somewhat older guys I’d known my entire life. They’d joined the Marines and gone to boot camp together when I was still in high school. Coming home on leave, they were confidence-radiating supernovas, showing off spit-shined boots and uniforms so crisp the creases could slice cheese. I remember thinking, These guys could kick anybody’s ass in town.

  I wanted to be just like that.

  I didn’t even think about the possibility of combat, much less getting killed. As a freshman in high school, I saw guys who’d graduated and joined the military come back to say goodbye to their teachers before going off to fight in Desert Storm. As a fourteen-year-old, I didn’t know any better so I thought the war would be a high-casualty conflict like Vietnam and they’d all die. Then I watched the war on CNN … piece of cake. Besides, as I weighed the idea of signing up, we weren’t at war, and there wasn’t one looming. I thought it would be cool to wear the uniform and sing the cadences.

  Plus, I’d only be gone for a few years … and then I’d be back at Maloney’s with a few war stories to impress the regulars.

  One day in April 1995, I went to the Marine recruitment office, but the recruiter wasn’t there. I remembered a funny line my Marine friends told me: “The Marine Corps is actually part of the Department of the Navy. The men’s department.” Which is why I thought of walking into the Navy office. I reasoned that if anyone would know where this missing Marine was, this Navy recruiter would.

  He was nothing special physically, but he was very clever. Had it been years later, I would have recognized why immediately: He was wearing khakis and had anchors on his collar. He was a Navy Chief. No matter what anyone says, Chiefs make the Navy work. They do this with intelligence, loyalty, and experience. They can also be mean as hell. This Chief had quotas to fill and that is not an easy task in Butte, Montana. Especially when your office is right next to the Marines.

  He looked me over skeptically and said, “Why do you want to be a Marine?”

  I said, “Because Marines have the best snipers in the world. I want to be a sniper because I grew up hunting.” He just nodded and said, “Look no further. We have snipers in the Navy. All you need to do is become a Navy SEAL.”

  I didn’t even know how to swim. But the way I thought about it was, “Hey, I’m kind of naïve, but this guy’s a professional recruiter. Why’s he going to lie to me?”

  And it wasn’t a lie. Exactly. Just a rather large omission. A kid off a hick-town street had about the same chance of making it as a SEAL as this recruiter had of becoming an admiral. So in almost complete ignorance, I signed on the dotted line. It was a deferred enrollment, which meant that I had six months before I went to boot camp.

  Which was a good thing. I could keep myself alive in the water but not swim. I’d never attempted a pull-up. A brochure that had been thoughtfully provided in the recruitment paperwork revealed that to even qualify for a SEAL tryout you had to be able to do a minimum of eight pull-ups. And that’s after you swim five hundred yards, and do forty-two push-ups and fifty sit-ups. And before you run.

  Right then I decided to quit my job shoveling crushed rock and devote myself full-time to getting in shape for the SEAL screening test.

  I’d been shoveling that rock for months, building my strength. How hard could this be? Full of can-do fervor, I ran down to a park near my mom’s house that had a rusted old pull-up bar to see how many pull-ups beyond the eight minimum I could do. I sprang easily fr
om the dirt depression beneath, grabbed the pull-up bar with confidence, and heaved. One!

  Gravity rudely yanked my arms back to full extension. It took all my will to keep my grip on the bar from releasing. My brain frantically signaled my biceps to fire and pull me back up. My biceps replied, “Fuck you.”

  Words formed so clearly in my mind that I may have said them out loud. “Oh, my God, these are hard. I need to get better at pull-ups!”

  Still, my optimism wasn’t entirely crushed. Yet. Next I went up to the college pool—fortunately, I still had my student ID. I figured I’d start with a quick 1,000 meters, which is forty lengths of the pool. By the end of the second length my arms ached and my legs felt like they were about to cramp. I could barely lift myself out of the pool.

  Okay, I was pathetic. But I wasn’t defeated. Every day I worked at getting better. One day at the pool, I was lucky enough to run into a friend from high school who was getting ready to swim at Notre Dame for four years. When he saw me struggling through the water he said, “What are you doing in here?”

  “I just joined the Navy,” I said. “I’m going to SEAL school. You know they swim like a mile a day there.”

  He looked at me and shook his head. “Dude, you have no idea what you’re getting into. There’s a thousand percent chance you’re not going to make it. Get back into the pool.”

  He showed me some basic swimming techniques and I worked hard to master them. My stepfather built me a pull-up bar in the basement of my mom’s house. I would go down there, queue up Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II, crank the volume to “liquefy,” then just do pull-up after pull-up.

  I didn’t realize how appropriate that title was until later, but I was definitely using my illusion that I could become a SEAL to motivate myself. I began to understand something important: If you want to get better at pull-ups, do more pull-ups. That’s it. And that’s what I did.

  One thing I had going for me was that I’d always been a good runner. I had a route that I ran, a straight shot down the street from my mom’s house, past my best friend’s house and my cousin’s house, to a stoplight that was exactly a mile away. I always wanted to run it in no more than six minutes. At the light I’d take a thirty-second breather, then run back.

  Every single morning, seven days a week, I’d get up and go down to the pool to swim for a few hours, come home, chill out and eat breakfast, knock out pull-ups, go for the run. For six months, this was my full-time job. At night I delivered pizzas.

  I was really enjoying myself. And I got a lot stronger.

  *

  ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 28, 1996, I arrived at the Butte military enlistment processing center to officially join up. There was a Problem.

  It had been some time since I’d signed my papers to enlist, and I’d nearly forgotten that in the initial flurry of paperwork I’d elected to tell the US Navy that I’d experimented with marijuana. It’s true that I only tried it a handful of times, and, to be honest, I didn’t even like it, but, man, did they make me feel like a sinner who needed to repent. If the me from today could give the me from nineteen years ago advice it would be, “Relax, kid. It’s been about a year since you tried it; you’re good. Tell them nothing. It’s gonna save us all a bunch of time and nonsense. Pee in the cup, sign the fucking papers, and let’s get on with the adventure.”

  But I hadn’t been given that advice, so I found myself having a long and painful conversation with a man identified as “The Commander,” promising that I would cut out my liver and eat it raw before I ever smoked the devil weed again. I’m sure he had better things to do, too, than talk to some eighteen-year-old punk from Butte. Like go and smoke a bowl of his own. Anyway, we both got through the day and I was allowed to join this man’s Navy.

  I still have a picture of me swearing to defend this nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I was wearing a red T-shirt, very classy for an official event.

  For some reason the Navy had booked me a hotel room near the processing center. They were going to drive me to the airport the next day. Possibly, they wanted to keep an eye on me, make sure I wasn’t going to get cold feet. It was the first time I’d ever been in a hotel room by myself. I was sitting alone in this tiny, bleak little room, my duffel bag tossed across the bed, thinking, Why would I stay here my last night in town when I could just go down to my mom’s house?

  So that night, with my family and my best friend beside me, I watched the Steelers lose to the Cowboys in Super Bowl XXX. The next morning the entire crew came out to Butte’s Bert Mooney Airport to wave me off. I was relieved to discover another recruit on the same flight, a fellow by the name of Tracy Longmire. He’d played football at the same college where I’d played basketball, and he was one of those badasses who played both offense and defense. He looked the part, too: big and mean-looking with a bald head and piercing eyes. But he was far from mean. He was a calm, reassuring presence from the moment I saw him. Even though he was only two years older, he seemed like a wise elder, humble when he could have lorded his cool over a naïve kid like me, and generous with good advice. It seemed as if he’d been there, done that already, and I was very happy he was around. As we walked out to the plane together I looked back at my family. No one said anything, they just watched me leave. Finally, I saw my brother, Tom, lean his head out and yell, “Good luck, Rob!!” I’ll never forget it. He was thinking, Good luck leaving this town and going away on your own.

  None of us could have imagined, dreamed, or even hallucinated then that fifteen years later I would confront a madman, the world’s most wanted man, on the third floor of an ultrasecret compound in a country I’d yet to hear of, and that as a result people would fill the streets of D.C. and New York City to cheer.

  Good luck, Rob, indeed. Good luck.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tracy and I got off the plane in Chicago and boarded a bus filled with future sailors, all of whom had joined to be SEALs … except Tracy, who had joined to be a firefighter. He probably would have made the best SEAL on the damn bus.

  Anyway, to hear the recruits talk, 99 percent of them were going to become SEALs. They’d read all of the books and thought they knew everything about being a SEAL, and they were loud as hell about it. Most of these guys could bench-press five hundred pounds, too. At least that’s what they said. There wasn’t a weight room in sight, so no one could prove them wrong. I heard more than one express absolute certainty he’d make it through the famously tough SEAL selection process. The worst part: I was buying it. I thought I’d prepared myself with my self-designed fitness program, but now here were these big city guys who knew so much more and were clearly better prepared.

  I started to wonder, Why did I even bother? I’m only from Butte, Montana. I’m not as good or prepared as these guys from Denver or Seattle or wherever… .

  At that age, it takes something special to realize this bravado is 100 percent BS. It’s easy to follow the other sheep and just lie down and quit. Lie down and die. Die of shame and nothing more.

  It turns out that this is exactly what the SEAL recruiters are watching for. They want the person who can recognize adversity, understand why his peers are folding, but have the will to say “No. I’m better than this; I’m not following the status quo. Nothing is scary, stress is a choice, I’m moving forward to see what is next.”

  It took me quite a while to realize this, though. The guys on the bus were scared, I was scared. Tracy was nervous, a curious nervousness, but he wasn’t scared.

  After rolling up to the checkin center at Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois, we filed off while being screamed at by the Recruit Division Commanders (RDCs). Feel free to read that as “boot camp drill instructors.” They were good, losing no opportunity to impress upon us what stinking maggots we were, but, to be honest, I’d seen Full Metal Jacket and other films about military training so many times I wasn’t that scared of them. Don’t get me wrong, I respected them and they were consummate professionals … it was j
ust that Gunny Highway, Gunny Foley, or Gunny Hartman didn’t show up.

  Still … I was in a bus full of strangers watching people get yelled at by nasty guys in Dixie cup hats. I thought, What a horrible decision I’ve made. I can’t believe I did this.

  For a typical, small-town white guy like me, boot camp was like the bar in Star Wars. Everybody (except for me) talked funny. There were typical southern rednecks—the way they said “canteen” cracked me up. There were noticeable differences in accents from West Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas. We had a few guys from the Philippines, one of whom didn’t speak a word of English, who spoke Tagalog or Filipino when among themselves. They may as well have been speaking Wookiee as far as I could tell. The two guys from Brooklyn were nearly as difficult to understand. We also had several black dudes from different parts of the country. The dude from Mississippi was probably the nicest guy in the division, and smooth—a total southern James Bond. And we had a couple guys from the inner city. Very cool guys, all joined up to get out of the neighborhood for a while. We all had one thing in common: What the fuck did I just get myself into?

  The movies made me expect boot camp to consist of endless push-ups in the mud and running everywhere, unless you were crawling under barbed wire. But Navy boot camp isn’t like that. We spent our days in the classroom learning Navy customs and courtesies, getting yelled at and cleaning up and folding—clothes, sheets, flags, anything that bends. Folding is huge in the Navy. Sailors live in tiny quarters so we needed to know how to keep our stuff tight and thin. It’s amazing, the amount of folding we did. I still fold my towels the same way.