The Operator Read online

  The next day, the locals who’d been terrorized by this al-Qaeda cell for four years realized that all their oppressors were dead. We could see their reaction because we had aircraft circling overhead, watching in case any more bad guys showed up to bury the dead. No more bad guys, just a big celebration. The party got so big, with all these jubilant people drinking juice and dancing in the street, that a newspaper in Baghdad sent a reporter up there. He asked, “Who did this? Who came last night?”

  The women responded: “Ninjas, and they came with lions.”

  That was the headline the next day in Baghdad.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Back from war, back to training. Again with parachutes.

  Even though I’d yet to parachute to an objective on a live mission, the ability to insert a SEAL Team **** troop on any given X by high-altitude jump is a potent weapon and those skills need to remain sharp. Which is why, on a jump trip to Arizona, we stretched our luck trying to get in one last jump before being shut down by weather. Lance was the jumpmaster—Lance of the “Lance Factor,” so I should have known something “interesting” was about to happen—and I was the lead jumper. As the first one out of the plane, my job was to get out below and in front and lead everyone to the target in our stack formation.

  I never jump a HAHO with goggles because they always fog up, so I go barefaced. Normally, that’s not a problem.

  On this jump, we could see a storm below us, billowing black clouds lighting up like flickering lanterns with angry bolts. We should have backed off, but we were determined to get in one more jump. Lance gave the word and I leaped—right into a hailstorm. I shut my eyes and fell for six seconds with hail hitting me in the face at 150 miles per hour. You may not appreciate this, but six seconds is an eternity when you’re being blasted in the face by dagger-sharp ice pellets at high velocity. When I calculated that I was in position, I pulled my chute and, as I did, tasted the blood streaming down my face into my mouth. From that point, I led the stack into the landing zone.

  After we all got down, I ran into one of my bosses, and the first thing he said was, “Jesus, man, you look like you were wearing a beehive for a helmet.”

  It wasn’t Lance’s fault—we all made the call to do another jump. It was just his typical luck that he was the jumpmaster when shit went sideways. As everyone was having fun at the expense of my pulverized face, Lance came up and said, “I think I know why you’re bleeding. It’s because you were hitting the raindrops on the pointy end.”

  The next day, we went back up. I was lead again and Greg the sniper brought up the rear. Sometimes we’d put our experienced jumpers in the back to manage the stack. They could see how everyone looked and tell the lead jumper what was up. Everybody pulled, and we got into formation. The air park where we would land was fifteen kilometers away. Visibility was good, and I could see the park as soon as we assembled—which made it easy to judge my angles. Everything was fine, or we thought it was, until Greg came on the radio from the back of the stack and said, “Hey, Jumper No. 12, you’ve got a line over, and you need to cut. Cut away.”

  “A line over” means the parachute is open but one of the cords going from the chute to the harness has wrapped over the top of the chute. That’s an obvious malfunction for the guy behind him to see, and that jumper could see it, too. Or he should have been able to see it. The jumper turned out to be one of our Air Force PJs (para-rescue guys)—an absolute wizard at any kind of medical needs from ibuprofen to field surgery. Cutting a parachute at high speed is no big deal—it’s muscle memory—you just chop it. But at low speed, under canopy as we were now, you have time to think about it, which isn’t a good thing. Because the Air Force guy was thinking, If I cut this one, I’m down to my reserve, and if my reserve doesn’t open, I’m dead. It didn’t take a medical guy to realize that.

  We were at thirteen thousand feet, and his chute was still doing its job up there, so he looked up at the canopy and said, “No, it’s fine, it’s good.”

  Greg said, “Yeah, it’s good now but we’re going to get to lower altitude and it’s going to get worse. You don’t want that thing collapsing at a thousand feet. By the time you get your reserve open you’re dead.” I was up front, but I was hitting my risers, twisting them so I could turn around and see this guy. Everyone behind me was doing the same. We could see the guy’s face get this kind of puckered, frowny expression. He was thinking about it. And then he said in a high-pitched little helium kind of voice, almost like a little kid, “Oh, ooookaaay.”

  He chopped his cords and—boom!—just as fast as you can imagine, it flew off, yanking the static cord on the reserve and—boom!—the reserve was up and perfect. He was still right on heading, and had maintained his position in the stack. He hadn’t missed a step. His voice boomed over the radio: “I’m back, motherfuckers.”

  So now everything was good again, we were back in formation with a couple of kilometers to go. As we were flying we heard, “Hey, you guys got an aircraft moving from west to east.”

  I looked down expecting to see a crop duster. You’ll see those quite a bit, and you can avoid those. But this was no crop duster. A commercial passenger jet was coming straight at us like a sky shark hurtling toward prey. It zipped past me, and it was silent. I knew it was US Airways not because I read the side of the aircraft, but because I could see the insignia on the wings pinned to the pilot’s uniform. They were that close. I could see passengers in the porthole windows.

  Theoretically, in that situation you could cut away your main chute and try to drop out of the plane’s way before deploying your reserve. But it happened so fast that no one did anything. We just watched this giant aircraft zoom past us. Then we heard some rumbling over the radios and somebody said, “Jesus Christ, what happens when we go through his jet wash?”

  All of a sudden, we were in the spin cycle of a giant washing machine, just getting hammered by the jet’s wake, and we were all thinking the same thing: We almost got hit by a fucking plane! If it had hit any one of us, the whole plane would have been wrapped up in a 360-square-foot canopy. All that silk and rope would have gotten sucked into the engine, and the plane would have gone down. Appreciating how close we’d come to a major disaster certainly made the rest of our descent less frolicsome, that’s for sure.

  The thing is, it never should have been the close call that it was. We’d submitted what’s called a Notice to Airmen to all airports in the region, major and minor, the day before. It says that during a particular time frame there shouldn’t be any aircraft in the area because there are going to be twenty guys under canopy there. Obviously, somebody either didn’t give a shit or paid insufficient attention.

  Maybe we ought to do something about that.

  *

  IN LATE WINTER 2008, WE were getting ready for another deployment to Afghanistan within weeks, and I was an instructor in yet another jump-training course in Arizona. Lance was there, too—yes, the Lance who almost got electrocuted in a swimming pool in Iraq, got tangled in a tandem drogue chute, and jumped into the middle of a hailstorm. When he said he was going to take the most dangerous jump course, instructors were saying, “Hey, Lance, this is a bad idea. With your luck, something’s going to bite you, man. You can’t do this course.”

  They were serious. It is a dangerous course. I hated it. It’s fucking scary.

  In the middle of the jumps, I got called to go on a mission to rescue some hostages in Colombia. By the time I flew from Arizona to Virginia Beach, I was too late: The plane had already left for Barranquilla. We had just two other guys who were home, so instead of flying back to Arizona, we figured we’d work out and then go out to Suffolk and get some jumps in. We finished a jump and were packing up the chutes when my boss, Street, who was there with us said, “We’ve got to get back now because Lance just died.”

  It’s like an electric shock goes through you. You never forget where you were when you heard one of your brothers has died. We’d lost Tom Valentine, a wonderf
ul guy with a wife and small children, less than a month earlier in another jump-training accident. His body was found on a golf course green where well-heeled golfers were enjoying the safety and security Tom had helped to provide. His guys loved him as did everyone else. He was one of the best. One of the guys jumping with him that day told me that in Tom’s last seconds he reported his chute malfunction—it’s called a “horseshoe”—to the rest of the jumpers in the stack. His last words were, “I love you, guys.”

  A week before that, Mike Koch and Nate Hardy had both been killed in the same room while clearing a terrorist compound in Iraq. Two months before that, Mark Carter, one of those amazing SEALs who survived being a Smurf during Hell Week at BUD/S and was nicknamed Badger after the 5′5″ dude took down a 6′5″ monster in a wrestling match, died on another Iraq mission. He stepped on an IED while holding external security on a house in a very dangerous city.

  And now Lance. We later learned that he’d been jumping when the same thing happened to him that had happened to me a year earlier. Only I’d initially pulled the chute at a high altitude of 13,000 feet instead of the usual 5,500—giving me time to fight against the g-forces and reach the release. Lance had only pulled at 5,500, and couldn’t release the reserve in time. He hit the ground at a hundred miles per hour.

  Guess what everyone said: “Jesus, we need to fix this.”

  You think? We should have fixed it a year earlier.

  Before we’d started losing so many guys, the command had us fill out these “What I want if I die” sheets. Because we hadn’t suffered any losses yet, we just had fun with those sheets, mocking the idea. One guy said, “If I die, I want Nitro, our one-legged guy who got his leg blown off on top of Takur Ghar during Operation Anaconda, to perform ‘Tiny Dancer’ a cappella.” Everyone treated those forms as jokes until we started losing guys for real.

  When Lance filled his out, he said he wanted to be buried in this cemetery in Pennsylvania, and he wanted a Camaro to pull up to the gravesite playing music from his favorite band, Iced Earth, at top volume while we all stood around drinking Natural Light. His mom would put the first shovelful of dirt on his coffin, then we’d all follow. After that, his instructions read, he wanted all of us to go to a titty bar right down the street.

  So that’s what happened. We drove one of his Camaros out to the cemetery, playing Iced Earth as loud as we could. We all drank beer and told “Lance stories” to his mom. To be honest, it was kind of fun. It was horrible because we’d lost Lance and everyone loved him, but it was neat to imagine him being happy that we’d pulled off his “if I die” wishes.

  Then we all went to the titty bar. We didn’t bring his mom.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Within days of Lance’s funeral, I flew in to a former Russian military base in Asadabad, an unimpressive little city in a bowl surrounded by rocky mountains. It was interesting occupying what had been a Russian military facility—a reminder not to let happen to us in Afghanistan what had happened to them, i.e., have our asses handed to us.

  Being at a remote outstation, I had more interaction with the locals, and for the first time really got a feel for what an entirely different perspective they had. You can sit back in America and watch the war in Afghanistan and think: If we just give them democracy they’ll overcome the problems holding them back. But it’s not that easy. Many Afghans—especially in remote regions outside major cities—don’t think like we do. For instance, it’s not uncommon to find people who believe in dragons—literally. We’d intercept phone calls and listen to two Afghans talk to each other about some event upsetting the dragon that spits a gem in the sky every morning to light the sun. That rumble of thunder? It’s the dragon expressing his displeasure. One time, we heard a guy saying that the only way to kill the dragon was with a German-made B-52, which doesn’t exist, by the way.

  I began to realize that when we thought we were communicating with these rural Afghans, we were often saying something that didn’t fit their worldview. We had a cook, named Idris, who lived in town and came to the base each day to prepare our meals. I used to chat him up and got to know him pretty well, but one day something he said irritated me, and I made a contrast between the slow pace of technological change in Afghanistan and the strides my country had achieved in only two hundred years. I mentioned America’s putting a man on the moon. His response was, “Mr. Rob, you’re so stupid. You can’t put a man on the moon.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “It’s just this big!”

  At this point in the war, we were working with an Afghani team—an elite, well-trained, and well-paid corps of fighters the United States had pretty much handpicked.

  With some exceptions, the regular Afghan military was a joke, but these guys were legitimately good, though I worried that they’d eventually be a pain in our ass because their loyalty is family first, then tribe, then money. So when we leave and our money leaves, the pay cut they’re looking at compared to what the Taliban will pay them … Let’s just say that whoever they work for, they’re good enough and better enough than the regular army to be the ones running the store.

  There wasn’t much going on in Asadabad then. We had a tough time getting missions. The ones we did get tended to fall through. This was the first deployment where I was the team leader. I’d worked my way up through the ascending ranks to chief petty officer—which was a huge deal in the Navy. Being a “chief” made me eligible for leadership roles on the team level. In this case, that brought with it the responsibility for working with a guy there, named Tom, who had a tough Cold War style, huge smarts, and experience. He had a deep understanding of the landscape: the tribes, the villages, the valleys. He really got it. He wanted to kill the enemy. I loved it.

  Eventually, our intel guys gave us a worthy target, none other than Zabit Jalil, the guy who’d orchestrated the “lone survivor” ambush on a SEAL recon team, killing three of four, then shooting down a rescue helicopter with eight SEALs, two pilots, and six air crewmen aboard.

  His voice kept popping up on the Pakistan side of the border near the Sirkanay District. We knew our rules of engagement made it tough to deal with the Pakistani border; the enemy would attack on the Afghan side then slip back into Pakistan where they knew we couldn’t chase them.

  Unless …

  There were two acronyms that we could work with: TIC and PID. They meant “Troops in Contact” and “Positive Identification.” If we were in a fight with an enemy force (Troops in Contact) and they tried slipping back into Pakistan, as long as we could maintain visual confirmation that it was the same group we’d been fighting (Positive Identification), our rules of engagement allowed us to pursue them up to ten kilometers beyond the border.

  We decided to do a bait-and-switch operation. We’d fly in at night with a few of my guys and a small force from the Afghan anti-terror team and hike up to the top of the mountain before the sun came up. From there we’d have a clear view of the border. Our hope was Jalil’s people would see us and attack—not realizing Americans, and their bombers, would be involved. Once they’d engaged, we’d call in artillery and hopefully air support and pursue them as they retreated.

  We assembled our men and made sure we all had enough gear to sustain us for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Because we were a small team and would be hiking in rigorous terrain, we split up some of the essentials. I carried extra batteries for the big radio, Tony carried the radio, Jesse had the Med Pack, and someone else carried the water purifier; not that we’d find any water worth purifying up there, but there was a river at the bottom of the mountain and you never know where you may end up.

  As team leader, I would serve as Ground Force Commander, which meant I would be directing the action. The commander is usually an officer, but there were none on this mission. I had with me Tom and Seth from the US Army; with the assistance of their interpreter, they could intercept enemy transmissions and help us anticipate their movements and intentions. We also brought about forty Afgh
ans along. We prepared everything, and half our force, which included my team, loaded onto a CH-47 for the fifteen-minute flight southeast to the border of Pakistan. Once we inserted, the helicopter would go pick up the other half of our force and return with them.

  I grew concerned as I listened on the helo’s Internal Communications System and heard the pilot explain to the aircrew what he was seeing and what he couldn’t see. Because the 47 is bigger than a school bus and mostly metal, the pilot doesn’t see what the rear of his helicopter is doing. He listens to the enlisted aircrew in the back as they give him measurements. Even though I could tell that the pilot was calm, it was obvious that the peak he intended to land us on had a smaller landing area than he’d anticipated, with bigger and more abundant trees than he’d hoped. Given the tight squeeze, the pilot decided the only way to land was to back the huge helicopter in and parallel park. He’d need to trust the guys in the back as they “walked” him (and us) in. I listened as they gave him measurements and adjustments, then finally, “10, 8, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1” and I felt the back two tires rest on the peak. I unplugged my headset and jumped off the ramp onto the small clearing. We set up a hasty perimeter until the big helo took off again.

  Once the bird lifted off and the backwash from its rotors died down, I led my crew a few hundred meters away where we waited for about forty-five minutes until the helicopter returned. Once it did and the rest of the troops disembarked, we all linked up, and I led the march up to our predetermined positions on the border. These were impressive mountains. They reminded me of Glacier National Park in Montana or the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Just ridiculously steep. I led us up because I was the most experienced of all of us. My two other SEALs had yet to be in combat; it was their first trip overseas, and I wasn’t willing to let any of the Afghans lead the way. This was a unique operation, and I wanted to make sure we got to where we’d planned.